Depends on the Seiko. Seiko makes and has made a large number of complicated and historically interesting watches and movements with a story, but your average Seiko won't have that.

If you want a cheap mechanical watch that's a historical 'first' and has an interesting watchmaking story to tell in terms of processes and optimization, get a Swatch Sistem51. It's the first automatic movement that is simple enough and has few enough parts to be mass produced entirely by robot. Of course if that's a 'good' story to tell or not is very much up for debate.

"but you didnt"

They're not very cheap, unfortunately.

Not really a "big risk".

You're already signing yourself up for that sort of cost, after a few years of wearing.

A decent new watch isn't going to have a defect. The parent referred to a theoretical $500 watch. Let's take something like a Hamilton Khaki Field Automatic. Decent watch, very handsome, and usually comes in around $500 (or less).

Hamilton is a Swatch Group company and gets the very, very popular ETA 2824-2 movement. This is the same movement that can be found in watches costing thousands and some times tens of thousands.

The quality and the internal components are the same. More expensive watches sometimes get nicer finishes on the movement and occasionally get a COSC certification, but by and large, there's little difference.

ETA has been making the 2824 since 1961. It is the workhorse of the watch industry. I've literally never heard of a defective one that wasn't a clone.

So, I'll personally guarantee that your $500 ETA 2824 will run for five years without defects at which point it'll probably need servicing, i.e. cleaning and re-lubrication. That's going to cost $200-300 from any Swatch Group authorized service center regardless of whether the watch has a warranty or is grey market.

Anything much cheaper than $500 is either going to be a Miyota or Hattori movement or a clone of a Swiss movement. I'd consider those watches to have a finite life span of a few years. Likely they'll not be worth servicing when the time comes, though there are definitely exceptions.

I just want to respond to this because we see a lot of the same comments in the software industry and I think it dilutes the meaning of the law to speak imprecisely.

If you make a watch and put a brand name on it for which you have no license, that is a trade mark infringement. It is illegal in most countries. It is not theft. Theft is where you take something that belongs to someone else, thereby depriving them of it. Infringement is where you use something that belongs to someone else, often without depriving them of it. They are different things, both legally and morally.

There are design patents, and I suspect that there are probably design patents for watches (although I've never looked). If you copy a design that is patented for which you have no license, you are infringing the patent. This is illegal in most parts of the world (but probably different parts of the world than trademark infringement). It is also infringement, not theft.

Fashion designs can not by copyrighted under most (all?) international treaties. If you make a watch that looks similar to another watch, but that does not infringe the trademark, nor infringe any design patents, then you are not infringing at all. It is neither illegal, nor immoral (IMHO anyway) to do this. However, it may be fraud if you try to pass it off as something it is not, which is illegal, of course.

Karl Lagerfeld, the famous designer had an interesting comment about look-a-like copies. When prompted in an interview (unfortunately I can't remember which programme it was on) for his opinion about people who buy knock bags he replied something to the effect of, "Those people are not my customers. None of my customers would buy those bags. Neither would customers who are happy with a knock off bag want to buy my bags. It makes no difference to me". As much as I realise that not everybody will have such an expansive point of view, I've always thought it to be an incredibly wise position to take in the fashion industry.

Serves them right, since most of the "high end watch" industry is selling 10x overpriced items to rich show-offs and overpaying suckers.

I'm not talking one-of-a-kind, manually crafted pieces with valuable materials here. I'm talking even the "low end" 2-10K watches, with BS generic mechanisms, and costing nowhere near that to make.

Who exactly is losing their job because of fake watches? I do not believe that you will be able to present any convincing evidence that replica watches are actually hurting the sales of genuine watches.

>Lot of money in design for some malicious smartass chinese guy to come and copy and sell by 10 times cheaper

What do you think about homage watches? Most people don't seem to have a problem with those, the guy in the youtube video specifically says homage watches are OK.

If you aren't familiar with homage watches, look at this: http://i56.tinypic.com/k4hug1.jpg

> I’m not sure that this would make it immoral, and how does this affect the buyer anyway?

It doesn't just affect the buyer. It affects the company being faked.

And it's illegal, so you're helping a criminal enterprise.

  "X buys fake watch, X likes fake watch, X buys the real watch"

Are you talking about online or offline scams? The fake watch seems pretty useless if you're just scamming people online, you don't need to ship the buyer anything at all. A fake watch would only act as a temporary cover for such a scam possibly allowing the scammer to scam more people, but it's completely unnecessary for the scam itself.

Offline, how does that even happen? I guess maybe if you're a pawn shop operator.

>If the counterfeiters are so honourable and have no intent to deceive, why don't they discreetly engrave the word "REPLICA" on the caseback, case, movement main plate and bracelet?

Why would they need to do this? They aren't scamming anyone, a vanishingly small fraction of their customers are. If a factory started doing this they would just be unnecessarily putting themselves at a competitive disadvantage.

I don't know you, but I'd guess that you're probably demanding far higher standards from watch counterfeiters than the businesses you actually deal with. Unless you're the most conscious consumer ever you're almost certainly regularly doing business with companies committing far worse offenses than trademark infringement.

Sure, Rolex has their LEC but that probably has more to do with identifying OEM crystals than anti-counterfeiting.

What anti-counterfeiting measures were you thinking of? I can't come up with many.

Seiko 5's had laser etched crystals as an anti-counterfeiting measure, and then, because counterfeiters copied that, they switched to open casebacks, an anti-counterfeiting measure that is used across the industry.

"Counterfeiting costs the watchmaking industry billions each year."

- Nick Hayek, CEO of the Swatch Group.

I would suggest that anyone buying a $50 "rolex" is not, in fact, being defrauded, and if they are - well, they kind of deserve it.

Seems like the immorality of supporting organized crime would depend entirely on the nature of the crime being committed.

>commit fraud

Who is being defrauded?

>lying sons of bitches

Who is being lied to?

That meaning is a criminal enterprise. The mob is organized crime. Drug cartels are organized crime. Any organization against which RICO might be used is organized crime.

> If it's "any criminal enterprise" then we just call that "crime".

No, just “crime” doesn't require an enterprise. A criminal enterprise is organized crime.

$10k seems about right for a fancy solid gold frankenwatch. These pop up for sale on forums sometimes, but they tend to be built by watchsmiths as a hobby and have almost nothing to do with the replica industry being discussed here.

The fact that people send their fakes to Rolex to get serviced (which then get confiscated) is proof that they don't know they bought a fake.