The US Supreme Court ruled in a 6-3 opinion Thursday that mistakes of law—and not only mistakes of fact—could protect parties from losing their copyrights on grounds of inaccurate registration.

Unicolors, a fabric design company, sued fashion giant Hennes & Mauritz (H&M) for copyright infringement in 2020. While the jury ruled in favor of Unicolors, H&M argued at trial that Unicolors’ copyright registration was inaccurate and hence invalid. H&M asserted that, while a single registration could cover multiple works only if they were “included in the same unit of publication,” Unicolors’ registration covered 31 designs not published as a single unit. Some were sold exclusively to certain customers while others were sold to the public.

The district court rejected H&M’s argument under §411(b) of the Copyright Act which states: “A certificate of registration satisfies the requirements of this section and section 412, regardless of whether the certificate contains any inaccurate information, unless . . . the inaccurate information was included on the application for copyright registration with knowledge that it was inaccurate.”

The Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, however, held that this safeguard was only available against inaccuracies stemming from mistakes of fact and not of law.

Granting certiorari, the Supreme Court, speaking through Justice Breyer, found that the distinction did not change the applicability of §411’s “safe harbor” provision. The court found that the statute simply refers to “knowledge” and there was no reason to suppose it did not apply to a lack of legal knowledge. Other provisions of the Copyright Act showed “knowledge” encompassed legal knowledge, since the provisions required registrants to know legal concepts. Since Unicolors was under a “good-faith misunderstanding” of the legal requirement, it did not submit its application with the “knowledge that it was inaccurate.”

Further, the court found that cases decided before §411(b) was enacted “overwhelmingly” found that inadvertent mistakes in registration did not invalidate copyrights. The court also referred to reports of the legislature to find §411(b) was intended to “eliminate loopholes” that could be “exploited” to block otherwise valid copyrights.

The court rejected H&M’s attempt to apply the maxim “ignorance of law is no excuse,” stating it “normally applied” to crucial elements of law in criminal cases and not civil cases concerning supplementary legal requirements.

Three justices dissented, saying Unicolors had brought the case on the question of whether “knowledge” required an intent to defraud but had now changed their arguments to deal with a “novel question no court addressed before today.” The justices did not agree with the majority that Unicolors’ new arguments were “fairly included” in the original question and thus found the ruling to transgress the appellate review process.