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Supreme Court's Breyer Ruling on Mistakes In Copyright Registrations

By Scott Graham
April 01, 2022

In what will be the last of his many U.S. Supreme Court opinions on intellectual property, retiring Justice Stephen Breyer broadly interpreted a safe harbor provision that Congress inserted in the process for copyright registration in 2008.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit had ruled in 2020 that §411(b)(1)(A) of the federal Copyright Act excuses inadvertent mistakes of fact on copyright registrations but not mistakes of law. The Supreme Court has now ruled 6-3 that the provision covers both mistakes of facts and law.

Justice Breyer noted in his majority decision that copyright applicants often include novelists, poets, painters, designers and others without legal training. "Nothing in the statutory language suggests that Congress wanted to forgive those applicants' factual but not their (often esoteric) legal mistakes," Justice Breyer wrote in Unicolors Inc. v. H&M Hennes & Mauritz LP, 142 S. Ct. 941 (2022).

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