Hairy Baby cries foul over Dunnes ‘Sound as a pound’ shirt

A David and Goliath battle could be played out in the courts in the months ahead after a small online T-shirt business accused one of the State's largest retail chains of copying its designs and selling them in-store at a fraction of the cost.

Dunnes Stores has been accused of replicating logos and slogans found on T-shirts selling on the hairybaby.com website and selling them at €8 compared to the €23 they cost online.

The Hairy Baby version of the T-shirt at the centre of the row, which is purple, features an old punt (pound) coin image circled by the phrase “Sound as a pound” in white lettering.

The Dunnes Stores T-shirt is also purple and features a pound coin - or at least a coin of some kind - also circled by the phrase “Sound as a pound” in white lettering.

The T-shirt retailer, which is nine years old and employs five people, is understood to be seeking legal advice over what it believes is a breach of its design copyright, although it is not making any claim of ownership of the phrase “Sound as a pound”.

Dunnes Stores refused to comment when contacted about the accusations, although The Irish Times understands it believes it can see off any legal challenge posed to it by the small internet retailer.

It is certainly no stranger to fighting such cases. Earlier this year it lost a lengthy and costly legal battle with Karen Millen after the British fashion company also accused it of copying its designs.

In a case dating back to 2006, the High Court ruled that Dunnes, in offering for sale a black knit top and blue and brown shirts, infringed Karen Millen's rights to unregistered community design. The retailer appealed to the Supreme Court arguing that as Karen Millen had failed to prove the individual character of the designs at issue, it was not the holder of an unregistered community design.

The Supreme Court rejected some of the claims but referred other aspects of the case to the European Court of Justice and in its final judgement it said the British fashion designer put the shirt and top on sale in Ireland in 2005, and that the items were purchased by representatives of Dunnes Stores. "Dunnes subsequently had copies of the garments manufactured outside Ireland and put them on sale in its Irish stores in late 2006."