Weekly IP Buzz for the Week Ending June 11, 2021

In this week's post, we see that the Supreme Court is to hear copyright invalidation case between H&M and Unicolors over copyright infringement.

Supreme Court Tries on a Fashionable Case Between H&M and Unicolors

Clothing giant H&M and fabric-maker Unicolors have been locked in litigation since April 2016. Now, the United States Supreme Court has agreed to hear the case between them, which revolves around copyright infringement.

In the case at hand, Unicolors claimed that H&M infringed upon its copyright registration for certain geometric patterns. In response, H&M argued that Unicolors’ copyright registration is invalid because Unicolors included false information in its application. Specifically, while Unicolors had stated on its copyright application that its individual geometric patterns were published together, which would make them appropriate for a “single-unit” copyright registration, H&M argued that this was untrue because Unicolors had actually sold some of the registered patterns separately and to different customers at different times. With this revelation, H&M argued that the infringement claim would fail because a valid copyright registration is a prerequisite for any copyright infringement claim brought in the United States.

Read the key takeaways and full article here.

Click to read the previous Weekly IP Buzz on Thriving Attorney.

For more posts, see our Ideate blog for the latest news and insights into law, business, and culture.

--------

In addition to publishing Thriving Attorney, Darin M. Klemchuk is founder of Klemchuk LLP, a litigation, intellectual property, and transactional law firm located in Dallas, Texas. Click to read more about Darin Klemchuk's practice as an intellectual property lawyer. For more on the latest developments in IP law, see the blogs Ideate and IP Questions Answered.