The London High Court has ordered Samsung to pay Swatch Group $11.6 million after finding the South Korean technology company liable over digital copies of luxury watch designs hosted on its marketplace.
The ruling, reported by the Financial Times, relates to 26 watch-face applications associated with Swatch Group brands including Omega, Tissot, Longines, Breguet and Blancpain. The applications were created by independent developers rather than Samsung itself.
However, the court had previously found Samsung liable for trademark infringement because of its role in reviewing, approving and displaying the applications through its Galaxy Store.
Court Finds Samsung Facilitated Access to Copied Designs
Some of the applications used protected brand names and reproduced distinctive features of physical watches produced by Swatch Group’s brands. The dispute dates back to 2019 and concerns applications that were available through Samsung’s marketplace between 2015 and 2019.
During the damages proceedings, the court considered about 160,000 downloads of the applications in Britain and the European Union. Approximately $10 million of the final award is related to the display of Swatch Group’s trademarks on Samsung’s marketplace, regardless of whether individual users downloaded the applications.
Mr Justice Marcus Smith likened Samsung’s digital marketplace to a physical supermarket displaying unauthorised branded products. The judge found that making digital copies of the watch designs available for free or at low prices undermined the exclusivity that brands such as Omega and Breguet had spent decades establishing.
The $11.6 million award is significantly below the approximately $170 million in damages sought by Swatch Group as Samsung had argued that Swatch suffered little measurable financial damage from the applications and maintained that an award of about $300 would be appropriate.
The court however rejected both positions and awarded Swatch Group $11.6 million in a ruling that underscores the potential legal risks for digital marketplaces that host third-party applications containing protected trademarks and designs, even when the platforms did not create the infringing content themselves.
