A stylish watch face for various smartwatches has been a commodity and one of the best features in smartwatches. What we didn’t expect is that luxury watch companies would notice that their designs were being used to make watch face templates and sold as their developers’ own design. The inevitable has happened, and now these watch companies are threatening to sue watch face makers for copyright infringement.
If you want a new watch face for your Moto 360. LG G Watch R or even the Asus ZenWatch, you can choose from various models you can find on the internet. I’m sure few of you have stopped to think that the watch face you just purchased or downloaded doesn’t belong to the developers, instead it belongs to Swatch, Tissot, Omega, Aqua Master or any other luxury watch company. These companies have designed their watches to be unique, and now anybody can get a watch face that looks exactly like an expensive Tissot watch.
Companies like Richemont and designers such as Cartier and Michael Kors are emphasizing the fact that a watch face is still subject to copyright law and the design of a certain watch face may not be used in a digital format. All the companies and watch makers mentioned have begun notifying various sites about their designs, threatening with lawsuits if the designs aren’t removed by the developers.
A watch face can look like any expensive luxury watch design and that’s where the problem of copyright comes in. Even though smartwatches aren’t the same as the premium watches Swatch or Cartier makes, the first thing one remarks about them is the watch face and that poses a problem for everybody if that watch face is owned by a designer or a company. Even though there is a big difference in appearance between smartwatches and luxury watches, a watch face that depicts a certain brand influences the brand owner’s image and is subject to intellectual property laws.