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Old 7 May 2011, 06:29 PM   #20
Tmaca
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Join Date: Mar 2011
Location: Utah, USA
Posts: 30
Right, except for one thing

Quote:
Originally Posted by usbzoso View Post
design patents expired long time ago ... not everyone can afford the real thing ... Invicta sales are booming
Everything you say is absolutely true, except for the expiration thing. Whether it's patent or a copyright or something else that one gets for a design (my bet would be copyright, but I could easily be wrong), although they do expire, they can be, and often are, renewed. I know of one case recently where someone had a Mickey Mouse watch on eBay, and the title was something like "Mickey Mouse Tank Watch by..". After the "by" was whoever had made it, there are several makers of legit Disney watches, even the ones made in the '50s. He was just using "tank", as many people do with rectangular watches, to describe the watch's shape. Within a day of posting it, he got an email from Cartier demanding that he cease and desist from using the word "tank" as it was Cartier property. And while I'm not sure when Cartier first made a tank watch, I do know it was many decades ago. Evidently, their trademark is still in force.

I'd think that some of the makers, if not all, still have enforceable rights regarding at least their most popular designs. I suspect that nobody goes after them because they don't think it is hurting their own sales enough to spend the money to do it.

Invicta Watch Group is in itself something of a ripoff, trading on the Invicta name. Invicta was founded in the 1830s by Raphael Picard in Switzerland, with the stated purpose of bringing quality Swiss watches to the public at reasonable prices. Then along came the "quartz invasion" and real Swiss made Invicta watches pretty much went down the drain, just like a whole lot of other good watches. In the US, for instance, they killed off Bulova's tuning fork Accutrons. In the early 1990s some US investment firm bought Invicta from the Picard family.

They do use some decent movements, ETA, Sellita, RONDA, ISASWISS and also Citizen/Miyota, but a lot of their stuff uses only some Swiss parts and the movements are assembled in other places. Not everything they label as "hand assembled in Switzerland" really is, and short of taking one apart to see who really made the entire movement, I don't yet know of any way to tell which ones really are Swiss and which ones just have some Swiss made parts in them.

They're based in Florida, so they're eminently sueable (is that really a word?), unlike a watch company in someplace like China, but nobody seems to have pursued it yet. Realistically, nobody who could even afford a Rolex, Breitling, etc. would buy an Invicta, so there isn't really any competition there. Maybe the makers even look at it as a long term sales developer. Someone just starting out, in his 20s or so, might buy an Invicta "Rolex", then, when he's made something of himself later on, go ahead and finally buy the real thing that it was copied from.

If there was some sure way to tell which ones have actual Swiss movements in them, they'd probably be very buyable, especially since they're available all over the place for prices a lot lower than you'll see on TV, if you just wanted a good looking watch for not much money.
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