Intellectual Rights and workers' expropriations [Introduction]

International audiencePerfumery constitutes a sphere of counterfeiting of all sorts. The act ranges from the simple appropriation of a brand name and bottle shape to a slightly more expensive reproduction of fragrances by using a concordance table creating equivalencies between the proposed perfumes and the sale of well-known branded perfumes. For a long time, however, in the absence of methods of objectifying olfactory similarities recognized by the courts, the counterfeiting cases drew principally on games of qualification that allow one to infer an illegal manipulation of brand names for promotional and commercial purposes. At the end of the 1990s, an industrial property consulting firm sought, in connection with a team of chemists, to create a battery of tests to objectify the olfactory proximities and to have the courts recognize this mode of proving the counterfeiting