It's casual Friday and I'm wearing a blue pinstripe white Ralph Polo business shirt. It has a blue embroidered polo player logo. A relative bought it for me in the United States. She bought it as an "out of season" design from an outlet store in California, probably for a price far cheaper than anywhere in Sydney.

Noric Dilanchian Video on Legal Design

Would it be legal if my relative buys bulk boxes of these embroidered good value shirts from the United States, and retails them in Sydney?

I'll answer this question shortly, inspired by last month's court decision in The Polo/Lauren Company L.P. v Ziliani Holdings Pty Ltd [2008] FCA 49. This case is the first time an Australian court has ruled on what is a label for the purposes of sections 37(1), 38(1) and 44C of the Copyright Act 1968 (Cth).  

My focus here is not technical. Instead, I want to talk about how to gain intellectual property protection for products, make money with IP and win in court if you have to go there.

Listen first to what I said in 2005 in the above short video made at our firm's Keeping it Real client seminar on branding.

Simply stated for non-lawyers, here's what happened in the Polo/Lauren case.

So what is the key practical lesson for Polo/Lauren and others who want to profit from copyright? The message of this post is that if your product depends just on copyright law and you want to win against parallel importers then build legal design into your product. Call to discuss how this might apply to your products. Look for example at Burberry and Louis Vitton products. Hint: they build legal design into their product. In a sense their design is their product. 

Call if you want to discuss how you can build legal design into your product and avoid the poor advice of carpetbagger lawyers, patent attorneys or trade mark attorneys. Those who practice carpetbagger IP law treat law like a commodity, selling you a trade mark registration here, a patent registration there and other off the rack services. Strong words? Yes. Being a specialist in copyright and other intellectual property law now for 25 years has made me very critical of low quality legal advice.