A global online marketplace has been ordered by the Australian Federal Court to pay more than $78,000 in damages to the Hells Angels Motorcycle Club for breaching its trademark.
Redbubble, which sells user-submitted artwork printed onto items including clothing, mugs and bed linen, was found by the Federal Court to have infringed on the outlaw motorcycle club's trademark by displaying items for sale featuring its sign and logo in 2020 and 2021.
It was not the first time this has happened, with Redbubble ordered to pay $5,000 in damages to the motorcycle club in 2019.
According to court documents, Hells Angels trademark officer Gavin Hansen bought items from the website that were in breach of the trademark, which were then delivered to his Queensland address.
Mr Hansen bought two T-shirts, a canvas-mounted print and a set of coasters in May 2020, and an acrylic block and another T-shirt in October 2020 which had the words "Hells Angels" or similar on them — which would infringe trademark laws.
This was accepted by Redbubble, according to court documents.
Mr Hansen also purchased a face mask with the trademark winged skull on it and showed the court screenshots of other items for sale which breached the club's trademark.
According to court papers, 11 instances of trademark breach were found.
Redbubble's assistant general counsel, James Toy, said Mr Hansen was one of two users with an Australian address that bought the items, which were on the website undetected from January 15, 2020, to January 5, 2021.
Mr Toy told the court that none of the Redbubble users offering the trademarked images for sale had an Australian address connected to their account.
According to court documents, three of the seven third-party seller accounts were terminated by Redbubble several months before Hells Angels started proceedings.
Mr Toy told the court the content operations teams, which moderated user-submitted images, had not captured artwork uploaded by one user because neither the artwork's title nor tags included the words Hells Angels, but was named "Outlaw Motorcycle Clubs".
He gave evidence to show the website had taken steps to improve measures to discourage and prevent infringements of the intellectual property rights of others and was beta-testing a tool to scan and detect copyrighted images.
According to court documents, if the Hells Angels had notified Redbubble of the images, it would have taken steps to remove access to the web pages displaying the images.
In his final judgement, Justice Andrew Greenwood said it would have been open to Redbubble with its "very sophisticated knowledge" of the platform to assign someone to see whether further examples of "Hells Angels" or the logo had been added and then disabled those pages.
In the judgement, he accepted Redbubble had gained very little financially from the products.
He awarded the club $8,250 for nominal damages and $70,000 for additional damages.
A Redbubble spokesman said it was considering an appeal as it was "disappointed with some aspects of the decision".
