With the continued popularity of smartwatches, and especially those running on the Android Wear platform, we’ve also seen a rise of custom watch faces to make the wearables more elegant or exciting. A lot of sites and apps have been offering watchfaces imitating some of the top luxury brands like Tag Heuer, Rolex, Patek Philippe. But now the brands are fighting back not just against the “pirates” but even the OEMs themselves.
Brands like IWC, Panerai, Omega, Fossil, Armani, Michael Kors, Tissot, Certina, Swatch, Flik Flak and Mondaine are all currently filing cease and desist notices to those who’ve been illegally offering their brands’ likeness as digital watchfaces for free. Another major company cracking down on them is Richemont (Cartier, IWC, Panerai) have already issued notices to several watch face sites and giving them 24 hours to remove images that are in violation of trademark rights.
Omega has also been pretty busy going through forums where their brand’s likeness is being offered for free for wearables, saying they should be taken down based on “registered trademark, copyright and design rights”. Historically speaking, there have been some watch companies that have successfully won a case against an OEM. Mondaine filed a case when their designs showed up in iOS6 and Apple had to reportedly shell out $21 million in licensing fees.
Leading user-generated watch face site FaceRepo said they have received several notices already but they keep emphasizing to uploaders that they do not encourage infringing content. They have also taken steps to ensure that those violations will not continue. They notify users that their content has been flagged and they have also introduced a keyword filter for those top brands. Now we wait and see who will win the “war” against fake watchfaces.
VIA: Torrent Freak
Greediness of the big corporations… They will choke with it.
No links for downloads?? 😉
http://facerepo.com/app/ *cough* *cough*
We all like to wear a copy of a luxury brand name on our smartwatch, I admit..i have in the past…
I think part of the buzz is knowing your wearing a luxury face that would normally cost thousands, and you’ve got it on your wrist, for nothing… but it really isn’t necessary, we have so many talented digital face designers, for some reason prefer to copy ..I say we should stop copying…i say we can create our own amazing original smartwatch faces, luxury watchmakers can only dream about…i say we can lead the way in future smartwatch face designs. I for one am a smartwatch face designer and I love this tech, as a kid I talked and dreamt about this technology, and it’s now here and available. And i dont want to give it away to these powerful luxury watch manfutures that will muscle their way in and control everything. Its ours….but I’m afraid to say if we carry on coping luxury designs, adding brand names, logos and so on… we’re the ones at fault and will hand it over.