A London court already found 26 of Samsung's smartwatch faces infringed Swatch trademarks. Now the two sides are fighting over the bill.
The fight between a Swiss watchmaker and the world's largest phone maker has come down to a number, and the number is $170m.
Swatch is asking the High Court in London to make Samsung pay that sum for 26 digital watch faces it says were dressed up to look like the group's brands and sold to people who thought they were getting the real thing.
The claim, reported by Reuters, covers infringement Swatch dates between October 2015 and February 2019.
Over that stretch, the watchmaker says the offending watch-face apps were downloaded roughly 160,000 times across Britain and the European Union, each one a small advertisement for what Swatch describes as a cheap copy of an exclusive design.
The brands caught up in the dispute span the group's portfolio, from Swatch itself to Omega, Tissot, and Longines.
Samsung's lawyers are not impressed by the arithmetic. They have called the damages claim “exaggerated” and “out of touch with reality,” arguing that Swatch lost nothing and Samsung gained nothing of substance from the faces.
It is the kind of language that tends to surface once liability is settled and only money is left to argue about.
Because liability, in this case, is settled. The High Court ruled against Samsung in 2022, finding that the watch faces infringed Swatch's trademarks.
The Court of Appeal agreed at the end of 2023, siding again with the Biel-based group.
What is happening now is the part that usually gets less attention than the verdict but matters just as much to the parties: the court is being asked to fix a figure for what the infringement was worth.
The mechanics of the alleged copying are almost quaint against the backdrop of the modern smartwatch wars. Samsung ran an app store for its wearables.
Third-party developers uploaded watch faces. Some of those faces, Swatch successfully argued, leaned on its trademarks closely enough to mislead.
The question the judge now has to answer is how much a downloaded image of a watch face is actually worth when the watch underneath belongs to someone else.
For Samsung, the timing sits awkwardly alongside a long record of intellectual-property skirmishes in Europe.
The company has spent more than a decade in and out of European courtrooms over design and patent disputes, from the marathon litigation with Apple to an Italian fine over software updates.
Trademark cases rarely produce the headline numbers that antitrust actions do, where penalties such as Google's record €5bn fine reset the scale. A $170m claim over watch faces is, by that measure, unusually large.
It is also a reminder of how much Swatch has staked on the smartwatch category it once approached warily.
The group has spent years deciding how to compete with the Apple Watch on its own terms, and protecting the look of its traditional models is part of that calculation. A face on a screen is, increasingly, where the brand lives.
There is a wider question lurking behind the specific one. Smartwatch faces occupy an awkward legal space, part software, part design, part brand.
A developer can build a face that evokes a luxury watch without copying a single mechanical part, because there are no mechanical parts to copy.
Swatch's win established that a digital rendering of a protected design can infringe a trademark just as a physical counterfeit would, and the damages phase will test what that protection is worth in practice rather than principle.
Platform owners that host third-party watch faces, Samsung among them, will be reading the eventual figure closely.
The sum is small set against Samsung's balance sheet, which is built on semiconductors and the kind of multibillion-dollar industrial bets that dwarf any watch-face dispute. The principle is the part Swatch appears to care about. The High Court will now decide what the principle costs.