Federal Court Justice Annabelle Bennett may have temporarily banned Samsung Electronics from launching its Galaxy Tab 10.1 in Australia, but Aussies have found a way to go around the ban. They ordered the gadget online.

Among the online sellers that offer the Galaxy Tab are eBay, MobiCity.com.au, Expansys, Techrific and dMavo. They get their stocks from other countries such as Hong Kong.

An online search yields more than 2,000 results for the Galaxy Tab 10.1 on eBay. Other online retailers, such as MobiCity, even provide a 12-month Australian warranty for the device, which is covered by the court order.

"If this is an outcome of the injunction, the harm is not to Samsung, which makes its sales all the same, but to the Australian retailers who do not have the opportunity to compete," Watermark senior patent lawyer Mark Summerfield told The Sydney Morning Herald.

"If we could ask one question of Justice Bennett in the wake of her decision, it would be this: does she really believe, in a global consumer economy, that there is any practical value in an Australian court slapping an injunction on a mass-market consumer product that is, in any event, widely available for purchase online?" Mr Summerfield asked.

"In the age of the Internet, an injunction in one jurisdiction doesn't prevent supply of a product into that jurisdiction, it only harms the retailers or resellers in that jurisdiction because they can't be the stores making the sale," Kogan Executive Director David Shafer told The Sydney Morning Herald.

Kogan was threatened by Apple with a lawsuit if it continues selling the Galaxy Tab 10.1, so the company complied. At the same time, Kogan launched last week two tablets with lower prices compared to Apple's iPad 2.

Although Apple has been winning patent infringement cases in different courts, it failed to factor in online sales.

California District Judge Luck Koh was the latest to hand Apple a court victory, but while she agreed that Samsung infringed Apple's patent, the company founded by Steve Jobs must prove that its claims on the inventions are valid.

When Ms Koh held the Samsung and Apple table computers up in the air and asked Samsung lawyers if they could identify which product is the one made by the South Korean firm, one lawyer failed, while another was able to make the distinction.

"It's no coincidence that Samsung's latest products look a lot like the iPhone and iPad.... This kind of blatant copying is wrong, and we need to protect Apple's intellectual property when companies steal our ideas," Apple spokeswoman Kristen Huget told BBC.

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