For centuries perfume creators and manufacturers relied upon trade secrets to protect their proprietary formulas—the creation of which typically required years of skilled and creative experimentation and considerable financial outlay. Currently in the U.S. and EU, fragrances have nonetheless been recognized as trademarks denoting specific goods. Today, such secrets are difficult to maintain given the ease of communicating digitized information, the mobility of former employees in possession of secret business know-how, increasingly stringent product disclosure regulations, and the legality of using chemical analytic technologies to reverse engineer once-proprietary compounds.
This presentation will present the servicemark and tradedress potential of providing legal protection to the creative work of perfumers, who are working in this new and rapidly expanding area of the fragrance industry.