Rolex won the BeckerTime case on the marks and lost the profits to a ten-year delay

The Fifth Circuit's revised published opinion in Rolex Watch USA, Incorporated v. BeckerTime, No. 22-10866, dated March 21, 2024, begins with housekeeping: Rolex's petition for panel rehearing is granted in part and denied in part, the previous opinion is withdrawn, and a substituted text follows. That substitution is close to the last thing in the case that ran Rolex's way. The reseller stayed liable for what it sold. The money it made selling it stayed with the reseller.

The withdrawn opinion of January 26, 2024 sets out the product, and it reads as a description of a supply chain rather than of a watch. BeckerTime, in the opinion's account, sold primarily decades-old preowned watches containing Rolex branded parts, and the watches at issue were sold as "Genuine Rolex" while containing both Rolex and non-Rolex parts. The refurbishing, as the opinion describes it, stripped the dial down to bare metal and, once the work was finished, reapplied Rolex's trademarks. The opinion's list of additions - aftermarket diamonds or other stones and settings, aftermarket bezels not made or endorsed by Rolex, and aftermarket bands or straps - carries no stated order relative to the dial work. Of the configurations that result, the opinion records that Rolex has never sold a watch matching the description.

Both captured opinions carry the sentence that settles what the goods are: "BeckerTime's watches are of another make and cannot properly be called genuine Rolex watches." The comparison the court works from is Champion, whose plugs "are nevertheless Champion plugs and not those of another make"; these watches, on that reasoning, did not stay Rolexes. The January text also records the demand side of the problem, in customers who "inquired as to the authenticity" and were "confused as to whether the watch is fully genuine Rolex".

The customizer's account of the same case runs differently. Luxury Bazaar, in a piece on the lawsuit and its implications for the secondhand trade, quotes a speaker it names only as Becker - the research file behind this piece identifies him as BeckerTime's chief executive; the captured page does not carry that identification. The framing of the piece is rights rather than liability, in a line the capture carries with no speaker tag: "We're fighting for your right to customize and resell your watches." Under that sit three specific assertions: that the scope of the case was narrowed from all aftermarket parts down to dial and bezel, a line the capture carries with no speaker tag; that the wording CUSTOMIZED BY BECKERTIME was BeckerTime's own idea, attributed with the phrase Becker told us; and that the case found clean hands, with no malicious intent, attributed with the phrase Becker noted.

Taken one at a time, the captured record reaches only one of those points. The district court found insufficient evidence that BeckerTime had unclean hands, and both captures record that Rolex failed to show the subjective and knowing bad faith that would have foreclosed BeckerTime's equitable defenses. The narrowing claim rests on the same page alone: Luxury Bazaar reproduces a fragment, which the capture does not identify as coming from any particular document, reaching disclosures for watches that include "non-genuine (i.e. not made by Rolex) bezels", and the capture cuts the list off at that item. No court capture speaks to the scope of the case narrowing, and no capture anywhere corroborates that the CUSTOMIZED BY BECKERTIME wording was BeckerTime's idea. What the captures do not support is the sum. The Fashion Law, writing on February 1, 2024, read the appeals court as confirming that a third-party seller ran afoul of Rolex's trademark rights by offering modified watches without sufficient disclosures, and as accepting that those watches were "materially different than those sold by Rolex".

The remedy, so far as these captures show it, is a labeling rule attached to hardware. The March 21, 2024 capture carries a phrase requiring that BeckerTime inscribe "CUSTOMIZED BY BECKERTIME" on the back of the watches. What that captured fragment does not say is who imposed the requirement or what the panel did with it; it is a participial clause with the surrounding sentence cut away, and no other captured page supplies the missing half. The same capture carries the phrase "adequately alleviate any remaining confusion" in the same condition, without its subject or its sentence. The nearest thing to a complete rendering comes from The Fashion Law, which reports the district court's finding as: "with the required disclosures, no customer requesting a customized watch by BeckerTime would confuse it with a genuine Rolex watch". That is a trade outlet's account of a trial court finding, and the two objects are different: a disclosure regime, and an appellate ruling about one.

Rolex lost the money to dates. The district court concluded that at a minimum Rolex's agent "should have known about BeckerTime in 2010, ten years prior to the filing of the lawsuit, and no later than 2013", the 2013 marker being the year a Rolex employee wrote that BeckerTime watches were junk. Rolex offered no valid justification for the delay, the district court found, and on appeal it argued that BeckerTime had failed to show prejudice rather than explaining the ten years. The panel found prejudice plainly: the decade of permitted sales let BeckerTime build a business it would not otherwise have invested in, and BeckerTime had been relying on Rolex's cooperation while it did, including Rolex's help importing watches for repair or return. Moses & Singer LLP, in a March 5, 2024 note carrying no named author, records the consequence - the appeals court "upheld the district court's application of the laches defense, resulting in the preclusion of disgorgement of BeckerTime's profits."

The second clock is shorter and gets less attention. Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 54(d)(2) gives a party fourteen days from entry of final judgment to move for attorneys' fees, and the January capture states there is no dispute that Rolex did not move, cited no authority to excuse the failure, and waived the request. A plaintiff that took ten years to bring the suit then had fourteen days to ask for the fees of bringing it, and missed that window as well. No captured page sets those two numbers beside each other.

One district court finding did the damage twice, in two sections that no captured source connects. Because Rolex did not establish subjective and knowing bad faith on BeckerTime's part, the equitable route stayed open to the defendant - a laches defense is unavailable to a party with unclean hands, and BeckerTime's hands were not found unclean - and laches is what shut off disgorgement under Section 1117(a). The same absence of an intentionality finding independently defeated treble profits under Section 1117(b) in the January capture, which states that the district court made no finding of intentionality and that Rolex therefore did not meet its burden. The narrow finding quoted back in the interview is the finding that closed both routes to Rolex's money. What that finding covers is worth stating precisely, as analysis of the record and not beyond it: it is about BeckerTime's conduct and Rolex's proof, and nothing captured here records any finding about Rolex's own good or bad faith.

Two captures, two rationales, and a limit on what can be said about the difference. The March 21, 2024 capture ties the treble-profits denial to the district court's refusal to disgorge BeckerTime. The January 26, 2024 capture carries both the Section 1117(a) laches route and the Section 1117(b) intentionality route. Both files are excerpt sets rather than full opinions, so the honest statement is a narrow one: each capture carries a different rationale in the text held here, and whether either opinion carries both cannot be read off excerpts. The canonical text is the published PDF in the govinfo package USCOURTS-ca5-22-10866; what this piece quotes is FindLaw's reproduction.

For anyone in the trade reading this as precedent, the next checkable step is paper rather than commentary. The court PDFs retrieved from the govinfo package for No. 22-10866 did not extract to text for this piece, and opening the published PDF would settle the two questions these excerpts leave open: what the full sentence around the inscription requirement says, and whether the substituted opinion kept the Section 1117(b) passage the withdrawn one carried. What the trade has in the meantime is short and physical - an inscription on the back of a watch, and a mark owner that won the question of what the watch is while, on what these captures record, collecting neither the reseller's profits nor its own attorneys' fees.