The Swatch Group’s trademark lawsuit against Samsung in London has been resolved—for now, anyway.
The South Korean tech giant was ordered to pay the Swiss watch conglomerate $11.6 million by a High Court judge for permitting its smart watches to display digital copies of watch faces from luxury brands such as Omega, Breguet, and Tissot, Bloomberg reported.
“Use of the Swatch Group brands on Samsung’s supermarket shelves, downloadable for nothing or for little money, is to my mind very damaging,” Judge Marcus Smith said in the ruling. “The low price is demeaning of the brands the Swatch Group seek to promulgate.”
News of the Swatch Group’s came to light this past June, when the conglomerate originally sought $170 million in damages in the case. 26 third-party watch apps were involved in the proceedings; altogether, that bunch produced digital faces that were downloaded about 160,000 times in the U.K. and the E.U., according to a June 19th filing. Tissot chief executive Sylvain Dolla said that allowing luxury timepieces to appear on smart watches “kill[s] the value of the fine Swiss watch,” per a witness statement at the time. That sentiment of damage to the reputation of the luxury timepiece brands in its fold was at the core of Swatch’s suit.
“Samsung repeatedly attempted to downplay the scale and significance of the infringements by trivializing the compensation owed to the Swatch Group’s well-known brands,” a Swatch Group spokesperson told Bloomberg in response to this week’s ruling.
Samsung, meanwhile, said in the lawsuit that it removed all apps that replicated the watch faces in question as soon as it became aware of the issue.
“We are carefully considering the High Court’s judgment and will consider all possible countermeasures, including an appeal,” a spokesperson told Bloomberg. The tech company and the Swatch Group did not immediately respond to Robb Report’s requests for comment.
A few years ago, a similar case dealing with copied watch face designs had been brought by the Swatch Group against Samsung; the tech brand was found liable in 2022.
Even if an appeal doesn’t come to fruition, that’s not the end to the Samsung-Swatch saga. A similar lawsuit is currently pending across the pond in a U.S. court, filed by the same luxury brands in the London case.
Authors
Nicole Hoey
Nicole Hoey is Robb Report’s digital editor. While studying at Boston University, she read, wrote and read some more as an English and journalism major. A class taught by a Boston Globe copy editor…