The new $10 note features a pattern from Te Hau Ki Turanga whare at Te Papa.

Iwi may face an uphill battle claiming images on new $10 notes infringe their intellectual property rights, says a prominent lawyer.

The Reserve Bank is being accused of putting a design from a prominent Maori meeting house on the new $10 note without iwi permission.

The newly designed $10 note features a tukutuku panel taken from Te Hau ki Turanga wharenui (meeting house) in Te Papa.

The whare was confiscated in 1867 and, under the Rongowhakaata Claims Settlement Act 2012, Rongowhakaata Settlement Trust was granted vested title of the Te Hau ki Tūranga wharenui.

Te Hau ki Turanga trust project manager Robyn Rauna said the Reserve Bank had used a design from the house on the new $10 note without the tribe's permission and has called on lawyers.

But Simpson Grierson intellectual property partner Earl Gray said the iwi faced an uphill battle from an intellectual property perspective.

Reserve Bank spokesperson Vivienne Sanders said the $10 banknote has displayed the image since 1993.

"This particular image of the new note was supplied to us as an authorised image by a representative of Te Hau ki Turanga wharenui," Sanders said.

The Reserve Bank would not comment further.

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Rauna said she first found out that the new $10 note featured tukutuku designs from the meeting house about one month ago through a weaver who had been asked by the Reserve Bank to go into the house and copy patterns.

The Reserve Bank bank had not gone through the correct channels in obtaining permission to use the pattern, she said.

"Like any other entities there are appropriate government structures in place for the representation of this house and the iwi."

The bank should have approached the chairperson and board of the iwi, she said.

"If you want to talk to the head of the fish, you talk to the head."

She was not prepared to discuss whether compensation was being sought but lawyers representing the iwi had been in touch with the Reserve Bank, she said.

A good starting point would be for the Reserve Bank to sit down for a conversation with the iwi, she said.

"If anyone went into somebody's house and helped themselves surely they would feel aggrieved."

"There's just a basic courtesy here that didn't happen."

In the years following confiscation of the house it was disassembled and put together various times, using some panels featuring designs from other iwi.

The design on the $10 note were not designs from original Rongowhakaata panels, she said.

"The panels are not ours and we acknowledge that."

On the Reserve Bank's website it says the design was "taken from Te Hau ki Turanga meeting house".

"Attributing it to our house, which is actually our property, is wrong," Rauna said.

An application was lodged with the The Intellectual Property Office of New Zealand in July to trademark the various images of the parts of the house that belong to the iwi.

But Gray said that if the iwi were to rely on copyright law for that pattern they needed to identify who the author of the work was and whether that author was either still alive, or died less than 50 years ago.

"It seems that it would be quite problematic to create a copyright claim for the panel design," Gray said.

The trademark application which had been lodged did not specify anything about financial services.