Glossary
French: contrefaçon de marque
The French term contrefaçon de marque is broader than the English word “counterfeiting” suggests — a frequent source of confusion for US readers. It covers two distinct notions:
So when French counsel writes “contrefaçon,” read it as “infringement” in the broad Lanham Act sense, not necessarily “counterfeiting” under 15 U.S.C. § 1116(d). The vocabulary gap matters in practice: a US client told that a competitor is engaged in “contrefaçon” may picture a warehouse of fakes, when the actual claim is a lookalike brand name on legitimate, non-counterfeit goods.
Both notions sit under the single label contrefaçon in the French Intellectual Property Code, and both are prosecuted through the same civil (and, for deliberate counterfeiting, criminal) channels. In practice, however, they generate different evidence and different urgency: outright counterfeiting cases lean on seizure of physical goods and customs cooperation, while sign-based infringement cases turn on the comparison of marks and the scope of the goods and services each covers — closer, evidentially, to a US Lanham Act infringement suit than to a customs seizure.
In civil matters, good faith is indifferent: an infringer is liable even if it acted without knowledge of the earlier mark. This aligns with US strict-liability infringement, but it is worth stressing because civil-law systems often require fault — French trademark law does not (for civil liability). A defendant cannot defeat a French infringement claim by showing it independently coined the sign or never searched the register; those facts may affect damages or the tone of settlement talks, but they do not defeat liability.
Where the signs or the goods are not identical, liability turns on a likelihood of confusion, assessed the way it is for trademark imitation — visually, phonetically and conceptually. Where the signs and the goods are both identical, French law dispenses with the confusion inquiry altogether and finds infringement automatically, a stricter rule than the US likelihood-of-confusion standard applied even to identical marks.
The closest Lanham Act analog is Section 32 infringement of a registered mark, combined with the broader Section 43(a) unfair competition action for unregistered rights — except France has no unregistered-rights track of that kind, since French rights are registration-based. Remedies also diverge: French courts award damages calculated from the infringer’s profits, the owner’s losses and moral prejudice, and can order corrective publication, but statutory damages of the kind available in some US counterfeiting cases do not exist in French trademark law.
A US company discovers that a French distributor is selling similar goods under a name one letter removed from its EU-registered mark, with no fake packaging involved — just a confusingly close brand name. Under French law this is contrefaçon by imitation, actionable through the ordinary infringement route, even though nothing about the case resembles counterfeit merchandise.
Infringement claims are brought before the Tribunal judiciaire by a writ of summons.
For strategy and remedies in French infringement litigation, see trademark infringement in France and trademark litigation in France; building the evidentiary record is covered in evidence of infringement in France. Ongoing surveillance helps catch infringing filings early — see trademark watch. See also: trademark imitation, statute of limitations.