The Smell of Protection: The Scope of Intellectual Property Rights in Perfume (Fragrance)
B.B.A LL.B Graduate, Jindal Global Law School, India.
Volume II – Issue III, 2020
This paper deals with the unsettled jurisprudential issue, whether protection should be extended to the aspect of perfume (smell only) in the fragrance industry. Currently, the aspect of protection is available to the perfume industry through the usage of trademarks, trade secrets, patents and even scent mark (in case of EU). In India there is not much development in this area due to which the paper has gone into comparing the laws prevalent in other countries such as Dutch, France, US, and EU in order to provide a comparative outlook and demonstrate the judicious reasoning for the court of law to appreciate the powerful fundamentals & support of law and accordingly arrive at a conclusion to bring forth protection under copyright to perfume per se. It is high time that the Indian law should advocate to provide protection for upcoming sectors, especially, fragrance by bringing the same under the purview of Copyright Law. Furthermore, as protection under Intellectual Property Laws has been extended to visual as well as auditory creation, it is long overdue for the same to be extended to olfactory creations.