Smartwatches are actually breeding a new form of piracy

When you think of piracy you either think of Jack Sparrow, or you think about those annoying adverts on DVDs that try and drill it into you that downloading a free movie is a crime. You don’t really think of custom smartwatch faces do you?

For years if you wanted to go around sporting the look of a luxury smartwatch, you either had to splash out and buy one of those watches or you had to make do with a cheap knock-off that might not even work. These days you can just download a custom face to your smartwatch for nothing, and the big names aren’t happy about this.

According to TorrentFreak a number of them, including Omega, Tissot, Certina and Mondaine, have sent cease and desist orders to a number of websites hosting free watchfaces. Watchface site FaceRepo told TorentFreak that the number of infringement notices has been increasing, and so far they’v been happy to comply and have even set up filters to prevent infringing watchfaces from being uploaded in the first place.

Obviously smartwatches are still relatively new and bulky, but it’s obvious that they could be a threat to the big watch companies — especially if anyone can go around pretending to own a luxury watch. But stopping piracy is almost an impossible feat to accomplish, and this will likely keep happening in the future as smartwatches become more and more popular.

I can see the adverts now, “downloading watchfaces IS stealing!”