In today’s society, dupe culture is becoming increasingly mainstream, and businesses are facing copycats at every turn. From fashion and jewellery, to furniture, beauty packaging and homewares, it has never been easier for copycats to spot a successful product, recreate its look and launch a competing version online, sometimes within weeks.
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It seems harmless enough. A manager needs a quick sales summary, so he pastes a customer spreadsheet into a free AI tool. Seconds later, the report is ready. But the spreadsheet contains names, emails, contact details and purchase histories, and no one has checked who can access that information or how it may be used by that AI tool. A…
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The Australian Competition and Consumer Commission has commenced Federal Court proceedings against Amazon Commercial Services Pty Ltd and Amazon.com Services LLC over terms in Amazon Prime’s subscription contracts. The ACCC alleges that: Amazon's Prime subscription contracts contained terms which allowed Amazon to make materially adverse changes to...
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AI can read a contract in seconds, summarise it and list possible problems. Sounds useful? It is. But that is not the same as reviewing the contract properly. A good contract review is not just about finding unusual wording. It asks: What does this agreement actually mean? What could go wrong? And which risks really matter to the business? Start…
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Facing the consequences of the Bunnings facial recognition ruling. A significant decision from the Administrative Review Tribunal (Tribunal) has reshaped the conversation around facial recognition technology in Australian retail. After a 2-year dispute, the Tribunal found that Bunnings was ‘reasonably entitled’ to use AI-driven facial recognition to combat serious retail crime and protect staff, despite an earlier determination by the Office…
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On 21 October 2025, the US Patents and Trade Mark Office granted Lululemon Athletica Canada Inc. (Lululemon) a US trade mark registration for the phrase, ‘LULULEMON DUPE’. This signifies a unique intellectual property protection strategy from the popular athleisure brand, and a potential shift in how dupe culture might be confronted going forward. Dupe culture. ‘Dupes’, short for ‘duplicates’, are…
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Registering a trade mark in Australia gives you exclusive rights to use, licence and protect your brand locally, but what happens when your business expands overseas? Here is what you need to know about protecting your trade mark beyond Australian borders. The scope of protection depends on where the trade mark is registered.
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In the retail industry, intellectual property is more than just legal protection. It is a powerful way to compete. From brand names and logos to product designs and marketing materials, retailers use IP to make their business unique and get noticed in a busy marketplace.
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Midjourney is a subscription-based generative AI platform that creates images from text prompts submitted by its users. Similar to many other generative AI platforms, Midjourney’s model is trained on data scraped from the internet, which includes copyrighted materials of third parties.
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End of financial year sales are everywhere and so are the massive discount claims, ‘60% off everything!’, ‘storewide deals!’ ‘sitewide discounts!’. You’ve probably seen them in your inbox or while filling your online cart at your favourite activewear store, but despite how sweeping these discounts sound, not everything is always on sale.
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