In a 4-year-long copyright lawsuit which claimed that H&M allegedly produced a garment with geometric patterns that were ‘remarkably similar’ with that of US-based Unicolors Inc., the court gave the decision in favour of H&M along with US $ 780,775 in damages, attorney fees and more.
The lawsuit was pursued first in a district court which ran in favour of Unicolors.
The company is known for manufacturing and owning rights to various patterns of design which then are sold to brands and retail companies.
During the case, Unicolors claimed that a bunch of 32 designs were filed for copyright. This was done in order to save costs involving filing of every single design. The filing did not contain inaccuracies which ran afoul of the Copyright Office’s rule regarding the registration of a collection of works as a single unit of publication.
This proved that the registration by Unicolors was falsely labelled as a single unit of copyright registration which reversed the damage back to Unicolors. According to The Fashion Law, Unicolors has been “terrorising the fashion industry” in a series of copyright infringement cases, the frequency of which has risen a lot in the recent times.
