There's an interesting debate going on as to what, if any,
legal protection fragrances should enjoy. This debate has been
ignited by a recent French court decision dealing with
copyright.
In an article that appeared in the 2 July 2014 issue of the
publication The Business of Fashion (B&F) entitled On Why
Fragrances Should Qualify for IP Protection, the author,
Kimiya Shams, claims that both innovation and imitation are at the
heart of the perfume business, with the result that there should be
IP protection for fragrances. Especially in the light of the fact
that the global fragrance market is worth upwards of US$28 billion
per year, with the small French town of Grasse - 'the
perfume capital of the world' - itself producing
perfumes worth some US$800 million per year. Shams says that this
is a very competitive industry, where companies spend up to 12% of
their revenue on R&D, yet one in three perfumes fails, and the
average lifespan of a fragrance is somewhere
