A London court ordered Samsung Electronics to pay $11.6 million in damages to Swatch Group over third-party smartwatch apps that replicated luxury watch dials.

“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.”

Swatch Group, which owns wristwatch brands such as Omega (it’s flagship brand), Longines, Breguet, Blancpain, Hamilton, Tissot, Swatch, and others, originally sought $170 million in damages from Samsung for allowing 26 third-party watch apps, that infringed on Swatch Group trademarks, to exist within the Samsung Galaxy Store. Third-party apps on the Samsung Galaxy Store provided users unauthorized digital replicas of luxury watch faces (dials), across about 160,000 downloads in the UK and EU, arguably devaluing some of the aforementioned brands.

“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.

Samsung has been held accountable for allowing blatant trademark infringement to occur within an app store they fully control. And while they say they’ll appeal it, the ruling results in a rather small penalty ($11.6 million) relative to the full $170 million the Swatch Group was seeking. So even though Swatch Group won, Samsung should be relieved damages are not far higher.

US courts are expected to rule on the exact same infringement violations in the near future.

 

Rendering by Nano Banana Pro.