Perfume by Any Other Name May Smell as Sweet…But Who Can Say?: A Comment on L’Oreal v. Bellure
Bibliographic record
Abstract
L’Oréal v. Bellure is a remarkable case. The ruling of the European Court of Justice, as reluctantly applied by the Court of Appeal of England and Wales, protects the plaintiff’s trade-mark rights against free-riding and prohibits the defendants from taking any commercial advantage of the reputation attaching to the plaintiff’s famous perfume brands. In doing so, it limits free competition and commercial expression without identifying any real harm (consumer confusion, blurring or tarnishment of the marks) or providing any clear public benefit that would justify such intervention. In this article, I argue that the case reflects a perception of trade-mark rights as private property, and the owner of a valuable trade-mark as morally entitled to absolute protection due to his investment in the creation of the brand. In Canada, we should learn from this ruling, prepare to avoid the mistakes of the ECJ in future comparative advertising cases, and protect the rights and interests of Canadian traders and the public against any similar expansion of trade-mark protection.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.005 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.030 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.059 | 0.035 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.011 | 0.003 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".