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Page Number: 9

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UNICOLORS, INC. v. H&M HENNES & MAURITZ, L. P. 

Opinion of the Court 

(or more) likely to arise from a mistake of law as a mistake 
of fact.  That is especially true because applicants include 
novelists, poets, painters, designers, and others without le-
gal  training.    Nothing  in  the  statutory  language  suggests 
that  Congress  wanted  to  forgive  those  applicants’  factual 
but not their (often esoteric) legal mistakes. 
  Other  provisions  of  the  Copyright  Act  confirm  that,  in 
this context, the word “knowledge” means actual, subjective 
awareness of both the facts and the law.  Those provisions 
suggest that if Congress had intended to impose a scienter 
standard other than actual knowledge, it would have said 
so  explicitly.    See,  e.g.,  §121A(a)  (safe  harbor  for  entities 
that  “did  not  know  or  have  reasonable  grounds  to  know” 
that  exported works  would be  used  by  ineligible persons); 
§512(c)(1)(A) (safe harbor for internet service providers who 
are not actually aware of infringing activities on their sys-
tems  and  are  “not  aware  of  facts  or  circumstances  from 
which infringing activity is apparent”); §901(a)(8) (“ ‘notice 
of protection’ ” requires “actual knowledge . . . or reasonable 
grounds  to  believe”  that  a  “work  is  protected”);  §1202(b) 
(civil remedies for certain acts performed by a person who 
knows or has “reasonable grounds to know” that he or she 
was  facilitating  infringement);  §1401(c)(6)(C)(ii)  (for  pur-
poses  of  paragraph  regarding  the  “[u]nauthorized  use  of 
pre-1972  sound  recordings,”  “knowing”  includes  one  who 
“has actual knowledge,” “acts in deliberate ignorance of the 
truth or falsity of the information,” or “acts in grossly neg-
ligent disregard of the truth or falsity of the information”).  
The absence of similar language in the statutory provision 
before us tends to confirm our conclusion that Congress in-
tended “knowledge” here to bear its ordinary meaning.  See 
Nken v. Holder, 556 U. S. 418, 430 (2009). 
  For another thing, cases decided before Congress enacted 
§411(b) “overwhelming[ly  held]  that  inadvertent mistakes 
on registration certificates [did] not invalidate a copyright 
and  thus  [did]  not  bar  infringement  actions.”    Urantia