If you're not guitar gear nerd, you might be unaware: Fender doesn't make the best version of its various guitar shapes (with one debatable exception)[1]. If you want an off-the-rack "S-Style" guitar (Stratocaster) there's a handful of premium, smaller brands that will make an objectively better guitar than any of Fender's offerings, including their premium "Ultra" series: Suhr, Anderson Guitarworks, James Tyler Guitars, Seuf, Shabat, LsL, Mario Martin, etc.
If Fender gets the industry to capitulate and abandon its shapes, there's a very real chance it does long-term reputational damage to the brand. Not due to lawsuit outrage but due to something much simpler: consumers and musicians no longer associating new production S-style guitars as great electric guitars. Today, the boutique builders Fender is suing do quite a bit to uphold the reputation of those shapes. Without them they're just designs of a legacy brand that mostly sells mid-market import guitars.
[1] That possible exception are Masterbuilt-tier instruments made by Fender's Custom Shop https://www.fender.com/pages/custom-shop The wait time is several months and the price starts around $8K USD and quickly pushes into 5 figures.
I disagree completely with the idea that people only still think of Fender-style guitars as good because of boutique builders. Not that I disagree with the premise that boutique builders are making better guitars for better prices. But rich engineers and lawyers play boutique guitars - almost everyone else, including most professional musicians, still play Fenders (or one of the other big mainstream brands).
Fender and even Squier workmanship is fine. Their fundamental designs are both good and iconic. In truth, most guitars on the market these days are pretty good and people mostly just choose the one that makes them feel cool and part of a musical community and lineage. So people would continue to gravitate towards Fender-style guitars for literal generations, as long as guitarists revere the legion of Fender players before them.
I say “would” because the damage here is IMO reputational. It doesn’t matter how much guitarists revere Hendrix, Gilmour, Clapton, and a zillion other legendary Strat players if enough word gets around that Fender guitars are made by assholes. They’ll stop making people feel cool. Corporate lawfare is extremely not rock ‘n’ roll.
As far as I know it's mostly rich hobbyists or people purchasing for decoration that buy Fenders just because of name recognition. Almost everyone else gets guitars from small custom shops because they're cheaper, better built, and you're not stuck with a single bridge style and two choices of pickups. That's if they don't just buy off the rack stuff from ESP or Ibanez, who have absolutely devoured Fender's market share in the under $2,000 category. Which incidentally is the largest consumer base. The only thing Fender sells consistently is the Telecaster and the Jaguar, both of which people prefer off the shelf versions of rather than getting from the custom shop because you can't really mess with the design of either without drastically altering the sound.
If you want an example of when this kind of lawsuit backfires and causes reputational loss like you say, look at Gibson. A few years ago they sued Music Man, First Act, Jackson, Dean, and a few others over the "flying V" design that came out in 1958 and had already been genericized by the early '80s. They won on trademark grounds against Dean and the resulting fear over the other open lawsuits caused a few Flying V and Explorer lookalikes to go out of production. Since then anyone who remembers the ordeal has warned people away from ever purchasing their guitars. Gibson were in terrible but improving condition in 2024 having just left bankruptcy in 2019 and the fallout from the lawsuit being revived last year has massively hurt their sales and left them right on the track to death again.
> But rich engineers and lawyers play boutique guitars - almost everyone else, including most professional musicians, still play Fenders (or one of the other big mainstream brands).
I'm familiar with this stereotype but two things:
1) Based on the data I've seen, a higher percentage of a boutique brand's guitars are purchased by working musicians than the mainstream brands. They're such a small segment of the market however those musicians seem rare by comparison.
2) Hobbyists, across all income levels, are responsible for the vast majority of gear sold. The working musician is really just collecting the "discount" from economies of scale afforded by this phenomena.
Is it an asshole move to protect a trademark? The bottom line is that the pop and pop and boutique shops are riding on the coattails of Fender's design. Why don't they come up with a new, iconic design instead?
Fender has cannibalized their brand, just like Ray-Ban and many other manufacturers known for a "classic" design.
But what's changed recently is that now they're not just feeling the competition from premium-priced guitars; they're getting squeezed from the low end, sub-$1K part of the market coming from China and Indonesia. Recently I played a Chinese made Telecaster copy that was better in terms of quality and playability than any sub-Masterbuilt Fender. The fit, finish, and fretwork were all dramatically better than any Fender I've played (Fender also manufactures guitars in China and Indonesia).
I'm a huge fan of the Esquire, Telecaster, and Stratocaster. It's a shame to see a once-great American brand get cooked by resorting to lawfare instead of QC.
So why not license the shape then? They could do a royalty with those deemed of quality and deny a license to those that are of lower quality and then sue them if they don't use the design. This would allow them to manage quality with lower reputational harm.
If a guitar company were attempting to enforce IP rights on a new design instead of one from 75 years ago with a decades-old cottage industry of copycats large and small, this would be a different story.
Small builders like LsL have the community’s sympathy. They don’t have the resources to fight a legal battle against the world’s largest guitar company.
I was just thinking about this: Would it kill guitar makers to stop copying the Strat and [P|J] bass? It is wild that the earliest guitar designs are still ubiquitous / the most popular types. For anyone not familiar: The matter is not about iterating on these original designs; there's lots of that too, including by the same companies! It's about instruments that are effectively clones, and look (at a glance) identical other than the name on the headstock. Sometimes they are fancy ones built to a higher quality than the original, but superficially look like clones.
It is also interesting that MusicMan (Another Fender company!) has gone differently; still some of the most recognizable designs, but they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end. (SUB, OLP, Sterling etc), and don't have the copycats of the Fender models.
Leo Fender could have protected the body design just like he did with the headstock, but he didn't. Pursuing this now, especially against a small maker, feels hostile and could backfire on them. I hope it does.
Since 2020 Fender has been owned by Servco Pacific, a Hawaiian car dealer that has some musical instrument holdings as well (Roland). It has a private equity arm attached from which presumably this idea came.
I wonder if someone up high in Honolulu has decided it's time to start the value extraction phase or prepare for a sale. It doesn't make much sense otherwise: this is a very brand destructive move in a market that's moved entirely by emotion. For sure they know this. Doing it secures their ownership over a bigger piece of IP than they previously had a fair claim to - not just the Stratocaster name, but the shape too. That might the brand more valuable in a sale.
From my cursory search, it just looks like they have a stock ownership position in Roland, not any real say in how Roland is ran. Kinda like how Game Stop has a position with eBay.
Not a lawyer and I don't have any insights to this, but I wouldn't speculate based off this - trademark holders kind of "have to" pursue each violation, because otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.
Legal questions (none of which are answered by a default judgement):
a) Is the shape of a guitar even a valid copyright claim?
b) If so, Stratocasters were first 'published' when you had to follow forms to get copyright in the US. Where those forms followed? I don't see a copyright notice on this very early example [1] which is claimed to be original.
c) Copyrights generally don't have an enforce it or lose it requirement, but is there an impact on enforcability from the very long time that similar guitars have been available in the marketplace with no apparent enforcement?
d) added in edit. There's probably an international copyright question, too. Was the guitar 'published simultaneously' in a Berne member state as well as the US (which was not a member in 1954)? If so, Berne minimums apply, if the work is copyrightable, in member states (other than the US), otherwise, probably country by country?
> According to Fender, the outcome of the case – launched against a Chinese manufacturer – gave the firm the legal right to “protect its designs in global commerce”.
So they used China scare as a trojan horse to sue other US manufacturers? There's some delicious irony in that.
suing US manufacturers who sell in the EU, because they can't sue someone for selling a strat shaped guitar in the US, the shape was declared public domain in the US twenty years ago
My first and last Fender guitar was a Squier when I was a kid and just starting to learn.
I’m sure the guitars are fine (the squier was for what it is), but I’ve always gotten the ick from their business practices.
These days there really isn’t anything special about their guitars there are a bajillion copycats that are almost as good, some that are better.
This kind of legal campaign just reeks of desperation from losing at competition. When you can’t win on merit and value, abuse the legal system. Gross. They’ve been on my shitlist for a long time and it looks like they’re staying there permanently. What a shame for such an influential cultural brand.
I am looking to get back into playing bass and have been completely out of the loop for about the last decade. When I started looking around to see what was available, it seems to me that guitar and bass prices are attached more to brand/model reputation than the actual objective and subjective quality of the instrument.
For example, the Squier and Fender basses with the same features are essentially identical. The Fender might have a higher quality finish and slightly better hardware (and is maybe made in a different country?) but I watched _many_ YouTube videos where professional bass players could not make one sound better than the other. Despite a 2x-3x price delta.
And most interestingly, Yamaha bass guitars are among the lowest cost for a brand-new bass, yet are also made surprisingly well and sound as good as some basses that cost an order of magnitude more.
This just further confirms my observation that in most any market, it always seems that the most popular brand is rarely the best overall value.
The ruling comes 17 years after Fender was famously unsuccessful in its attempts to make its Stratocaster, Telecaster and Precision guitar body shapes a trademark in the US, decades after the designs were first produced.
That litigation process lasted five years, and demonstrated that countless companies had used the body shapes that Fender had sought to trademark. In the end, the courts ruled that the Stratocaster shape was “so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in a dictionary”.
Oh, a bit late to sue the company I got my Strat-clone ~28 years ago. In Germany.
They don't even exist anymore.
:-)
Is it even legal to wait that long? Can anyone change their minds after decades of looking away?
Customary law (esp. in Germany) might disagree with that ruling?
Can someone explain what the actual legal basis for this is? The shape of the guitar is very old (75+ years) and has been extensively copied before, so one would assume that patents and trademarks would not cover it.
They are basing their claims on copyright[1], which is longer than 75+ years[2]. The first case they filed (in Germany, against a Chinese manufacturer) "validated" their copyright claims because the Chinese manufacturer did not turn up to court so the court ruled in Fender's favor in a default judgment. The small companies being sued could still fight Fender in court and overturn that default judgment, but court cases are expensive and Fender is massive. It's Fender abusing the courts to bully their competition.
[1] "The Dusseldorf court deemed that the Stratocaster design qualified as a copyrighted work of applied art under German and European law, thus prohibiting Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co. from manufacturing, offering or distributing guitars featuring the Stratocaster body shape in Germany and the EU."https://www.guitarworld.com/music-industry/fender-legal-ruli...
[2] "The chosen term for a work was 70 years from the death of the author."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_... Leo Fender passed in 1991, so any copyrights attributable to him expire in the year 2061 (ie another 35 years from now, more than 100 years after the first strats were sold). I'm not 100% sure this is the copyright situation Fender asserted, but it's probably something not very far off from this. If you think this copyright duration is absolutely ludicrous, you are correct.
I think Fender are idiots for doing this but I also wonder why companies copy the body style so slavishly. You would think makers of musical instruments would be a little more creative themselves.
I guess Steinberger guitars are protected by some branding too, also Steinberger seems to own some patents (maybe the headless/bridge combo?). No idea if they are still valid.
Fender suing Harley Benton could backfire spectacularly.
The reason Fender won in Germany was because the Chinese defendant did not show up. Thomann on the other hand will show up, is significantly larger than Fender and is no stranger to lawsuits.
How could this possibly be enforcable now after they let it go for 50+ years, and the design is ubiquitous? Prima facie absurd, I really hope the legal system is equipped to deal with this.
I’m always fascinated when companies in industries with extremely passionate customer bases make moves like this when if you just thought it through the probable timeline you would expect them to tread much more lightly. But that’s what you get with management that is out of touch with their customers and industry and only focused on short term numbers. Rather telling of the leadership of Fender than anything else
I feel your pain. Learning the basics of IP law is one of those "curses of knowledge"[1] because you can never not sound like a pedantic asshole whenever someone who doesn't know IP law tries to talk about IP law. "No, it's not a trademark suit, it doesn't matter if they've tried to defend it before. What, why are you even bringing up patents, it's not a specific, narrow invention, and it would've expired decades ago even if it was. Ahhh!"
this is a cringe attempt by people holding "legal rights" to something so far gone in history and precident to be just an embarassment and likely criminal persecution of ordinary crafts people building guitars.
If ,whatever hidden legal entity that controls the trade marks, was smart, they would be begging the best indipendent makers to colaberate in making true masterpiece guitars under just that idea, "custom made FOR fender" by person X, paying them a premium, and then re selling to the world market for whatever they can get.
Sorry if I'm explaining the joke, but the term comes from Fender's guitars called Stratocasters. It's a popular guitar shape & configuration, so very many companies have made their own versions of it. However, Stratocaster is a trademark of Fender, so companies don't like to use that name to describe their products, to try to avoid Fender's lawsuits. So the industry has used the term "S-type" or "S-style" to refer to Stratocaster style guitars without actually using the trademarked name.
Similarly, "T-type" and "T-style" is used to refer to guitars similar to Fender's Telecaster guitars.
Yes, it's easier to settle a debate on the best Linux distro than on the best Strat.
For Mayonnaise, Billy Corgan used a 60$ guitar that produced unwanted feedback but kept the sounds into the final result which makes it so unique, it was the best in that situation.
You can make the best product, or hire the best lawyers. If you've slipped on product quality relative to the competition, the lawyer option starts to look really good.
Unpopular opinion: I struggle to get angry at this. These are clearly rip-offs of the Stratocaster design. Sure, Fender makes crappy guitars nowadays and has mostly ruined their brand. Go make a new design. Let Fender die. Cases like this are exactly what copyright law is made for, and its a judicious and good application of it. I'm not going to feel sorry for these shops because they're small mom & pop shops when I would feel angry about it if it were some huge chinese factory doing it. The same laws apply to everyone.
Except the design was never copyrighted. It was created at a time when you had to register with the copyright office, which they didn't do. This is just an attempted money grab.
So to give some quick history, big traditional brands like Gibson and Fender entered a slump back in the mid 60s. The companies were bought out by Norlin and CBS at the height of the electric guitar popularity, and things took a turn for the worse when all the cost-cutting measures started becoming noticeable. Hence why 50s and 60s guitars from those brands cost a fortune today.
This decrease in quality ushered in an era of Japanese manufacturers producing high-quality copies of both Gibson and Fender guitars. They straight up copies the guitars, but often made them better than those available at the time (mid 70s, when both Gibson and Fender were at the lowest point).
Gibson acted fast, and filed lawsuits against those brands. Some big household brands today, like Ibanez, obliged and went onto making their own designs which became wildly popular. Other brands, like Tokai, Greco, Fernandes, and many others continued to make their Gibson and Fender copies for the Japanese market. AFAIK, those guitars could not be sold in the US due to the lawsuits.
Eventually both Gibson and Fender came out of the slump in the early 80s. By now, there was a whole cottage industry of boutique / custom guitar makers in the US making high-end stratocaster and telecaster (S- and T-style) type guitars - these brands were making guitars for the discerning customer, in a time where Fender didn't have any custom shop option. Schecter was one of the big emerging brands back then, making high-quality guitars for players like Mark Knopfler. You then got brands like Tom Anderson, Zion, Pensa-Suhr, and others. In the late 80s they all landed on using their own headstock shapes and slightly different S- and T-style bodies. Probably to avoid paying licensing fees to Fender.
Traditionally, the only thing that was completely off-limits, used to be the headstock. If you made a Fender style headstock, or open-book Gibson style headstock, you'd hear from their lawyers - that's just how it always was.
Brands like Charvel, which made their name in the early 80s by using Stratocaster headstocks, did not produce any US made guitars with such a headstock until they were acquired by Fender FMIC 20 years later. Even smaller boutique builders had a thriving industry making Charvel "Strathead" replicas back in the 90s / early 00s. But the bodies they used were very clearly S- and T- style bodies. Again, Fender didn't seem to bother. Fender tried to register (in the US) their most common bodies in 2009, but that was rejected.
So the long short has been that for all these years, pretty much since the 60s and 70s, the bodies have been more or less "public domain", in the sense the Fender didn't go after anyone that made those bodies. And again in 2009, they failed to trademark the body designs.
In the 2000s/2010s guitar production in China really took off, and became the leading producer of cheap guitars. Prior to that, it used to be Indonesia. Prior to that, Korea. Prior to that, Taiwan. Prior to that, Japan.
The sheer production capacity, and price, made it possible for pretty much any in-store brand or budget brand to pump out S- and T-style guitars. For every US made Fender, there are probably 100 Chinese made for brands like Harley Benton. And then you also have the straight up replicas sold on AliExpress, Temu, and what have you. These also use to Fender headstock.
All this has lead to where we are now. Fender sued some Chinese company, won by no-show in Germany, and are now trying to go after all brands that use the S- and T-style *body shape*.
Why is this huge? Well, for one the body shape is by now so generic, it would be like Ford suddenly suing all car manufacturers in the world because they are creating cars with a generic sedan or station wagon body design. If we continue with the car analogy, think of the headstock as a very distinctive thing on a car - like the logo and front grill. Of course, some bodies are unique - like flying V, Explorer, Les Paul.
But for the lack of a better explanation, history just made the Fender Strat and Tele styles generic. Probably due to the lack of enforcement from Fender, and patents expiring in the 60s/70s for those things.
Another reason that I don't think anyone's commented on is that it wasn't until the very late 1960's that the Stratocaster really took off. That was because of Jimi Hendrix adopting it. Before that, the Jazzmaster was Fender's top-of-the-line guitar; the Strat was an afterthought. After Hendrix died, players like Eric Clapton were inspired to make the Strat their #1 guitar. Because of all that, Fender didn't think they needed to license the body shape.
If you're not guitar gear nerd, you might be unaware: Fender doesn't make the best version of its various guitar shapes (with one debatable exception)[1]. If you want an off-the-rack "S-Style" guitar (Stratocaster) there's a handful of premium, smaller brands that will make an objectively better guitar than any of Fender's offerings, including their premium "Ultra" series: Suhr, Anderson Guitarworks, James Tyler Guitars, Seuf, Shabat, LsL, Mario Martin, etc.
If Fender gets the industry to capitulate and abandon its shapes, there's a very real chance it does long-term reputational damage to the brand. Not due to lawsuit outrage but due to something much simpler: consumers and musicians no longer associating new production S-style guitars as great electric guitars. Today, the boutique builders Fender is suing do quite a bit to uphold the reputation of those shapes. Without them they're just designs of a legacy brand that mostly sells mid-market import guitars.
[1] That possible exception are Masterbuilt-tier instruments made by Fender's Custom Shop https://www.fender.com/pages/custom-shop The wait time is several months and the price starts around $8K USD and quickly pushes into 5 figures.
I disagree completely with the idea that people only still think of Fender-style guitars as good because of boutique builders. Not that I disagree with the premise that boutique builders are making better guitars for better prices. But rich engineers and lawyers play boutique guitars - almost everyone else, including most professional musicians, still play Fenders (or one of the other big mainstream brands).
Fender and even Squier workmanship is fine. Their fundamental designs are both good and iconic. In truth, most guitars on the market these days are pretty good and people mostly just choose the one that makes them feel cool and part of a musical community and lineage. So people would continue to gravitate towards Fender-style guitars for literal generations, as long as guitarists revere the legion of Fender players before them.
I say “would” because the damage here is IMO reputational. It doesn’t matter how much guitarists revere Hendrix, Gilmour, Clapton, and a zillion other legendary Strat players if enough word gets around that Fender guitars are made by assholes. They’ll stop making people feel cool. Corporate lawfare is extremely not rock ‘n’ roll.
As far as I know it's mostly rich hobbyists or people purchasing for decoration that buy Fenders just because of name recognition. Almost everyone else gets guitars from small custom shops because they're cheaper, better built, and you're not stuck with a single bridge style and two choices of pickups. That's if they don't just buy off the rack stuff from ESP or Ibanez, who have absolutely devoured Fender's market share in the under $2,000 category. Which incidentally is the largest consumer base. The only thing Fender sells consistently is the Telecaster and the Jaguar, both of which people prefer off the shelf versions of rather than getting from the custom shop because you can't really mess with the design of either without drastically altering the sound.
If you want an example of when this kind of lawsuit backfires and causes reputational loss like you say, look at Gibson. A few years ago they sued Music Man, First Act, Jackson, Dean, and a few others over the "flying V" design that came out in 1958 and had already been genericized by the early '80s. They won on trademark grounds against Dean and the resulting fear over the other open lawsuits caused a few Flying V and Explorer lookalikes to go out of production. Since then anyone who remembers the ordeal has warned people away from ever purchasing their guitars. Gibson were in terrible but improving condition in 2024 having just left bankruptcy in 2019 and the fallout from the lawsuit being revived last year has massively hurt their sales and left them right on the track to death again.
I don’t think this is true. I think it’s a beginner musician attitude (due to branding) but musicians often grow out of it.
I would never get a fender for quality / value reasons. Some of them look cool; which may be why they want to sue.
But the quality of the instrument and the sound is too important to me personally.
To me 3K is the most i’ve paid for an instrument, and I gig with two <600$ guitars.
> But rich engineers and lawyers play boutique guitars - almost everyone else, including most professional musicians, still play Fenders (or one of the other big mainstream brands).
I'm familiar with this stereotype but two things:
1) Based on the data I've seen, a higher percentage of a boutique brand's guitars are purchased by working musicians than the mainstream brands. They're such a small segment of the market however those musicians seem rare by comparison.
2) Hobbyists, across all income levels, are responsible for the vast majority of gear sold. The working musician is really just collecting the "discount" from economies of scale afforded by this phenomena.
Is it an asshole move to protect a trademark? The bottom line is that the pop and pop and boutique shops are riding on the coattails of Fender's design. Why don't they come up with a new, iconic design instead?
Fender has cannibalized their brand, just like Ray-Ban and many other manufacturers known for a "classic" design.
But what's changed recently is that now they're not just feeling the competition from premium-priced guitars; they're getting squeezed from the low end, sub-$1K part of the market coming from China and Indonesia. Recently I played a Chinese made Telecaster copy that was better in terms of quality and playability than any sub-Masterbuilt Fender. The fit, finish, and fretwork were all dramatically better than any Fender I've played (Fender also manufactures guitars in China and Indonesia).
I'm a huge fan of the Esquire, Telecaster, and Stratocaster. It's a shame to see a once-great American brand get cooked by resorting to lawfare instead of QC.
So why not license the shape then? They could do a royalty with those deemed of quality and deny a license to those that are of lower quality and then sue them if they don't use the design. This would allow them to manage quality with lower reputational harm.
Is there any specific technical value in the shape, or is it just iconic and there are plenty of other just as good shapes?
If a guitar company were attempting to enforce IP rights on a new design instead of one from 75 years ago with a decades-old cottage industry of copycats large and small, this would be a different story.
Small builders like LsL have the community’s sympathy. They don’t have the resources to fight a legal battle against the world’s largest guitar company.
I think this captures the most important points.
I was just thinking about this: Would it kill guitar makers to stop copying the Strat and [P|J] bass? It is wild that the earliest guitar designs are still ubiquitous / the most popular types. For anyone not familiar: The matter is not about iterating on these original designs; there's lots of that too, including by the same companies! It's about instruments that are effectively clones, and look (at a glance) identical other than the name on the headstock. Sometimes they are fancy ones built to a higher quality than the original, but superficially look like clones.
It is also interesting that MusicMan (Another Fender company!) has gone differently; still some of the most recognizable designs, but they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end. (SUB, OLP, Sterling etc), and don't have the copycats of the Fender models.
Leo Fender could have protected the body design just like he did with the headstock, but he didn't. Pursuing this now, especially against a small maker, feels hostile and could backfire on them. I hope it does.
Since 2020 Fender has been owned by Servco Pacific, a Hawaiian car dealer that has some musical instrument holdings as well (Roland). It has a private equity arm attached from which presumably this idea came.
I wonder if someone up high in Honolulu has decided it's time to start the value extraction phase or prepare for a sale. It doesn't make much sense otherwise: this is a very brand destructive move in a market that's moved entirely by emotion. For sure they know this. Doing it secures their ownership over a bigger piece of IP than they previously had a fair claim to - not just the Stratocaster name, but the shape too. That might the brand more valuable in a sale.
From my cursory search, it just looks like they have a stock ownership position in Roland, not any real say in how Roland is ran. Kinda like how Game Stop has a position with eBay.
Not a lawyer and I don't have any insights to this, but I wouldn't speculate based off this - trademark holders kind of "have to" pursue each violation, because otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.
Legal questions (none of which are answered by a default judgement):
a) Is the shape of a guitar even a valid copyright claim?
b) If so, Stratocasters were first 'published' when you had to follow forms to get copyright in the US. Where those forms followed? I don't see a copyright notice on this very early example [1] which is claimed to be original.
c) Copyrights generally don't have an enforce it or lose it requirement, but is there an impact on enforcability from the very long time that similar guitars have been available in the marketplace with no apparent enforcement?
d) added in edit. There's probably an international copyright question, too. Was the guitar 'published simultaneously' in a Berne member state as well as the US (which was not a member in 1954)? If so, Berne minimums apply, if the work is copyrightable, in member states (other than the US), otherwise, probably country by country?
[1] https://wellstrungguitars.com/guitar/stratocaster-sunburst-2...
> According to Fender, the outcome of the case – launched against a Chinese manufacturer – gave the firm the legal right to “protect its designs in global commerce”.
So they used China scare as a trojan horse to sue other US manufacturers? There's some delicious irony in that.
Plus the Chinese firm didn't even show up to defend themselves, so it was a default judgement.
suing US manufacturers who sell in the EU, because they can't sue someone for selling a strat shaped guitar in the US, the shape was declared public domain in the US twenty years ago
My first and last Fender guitar was a Squier when I was a kid and just starting to learn.
I’m sure the guitars are fine (the squier was for what it is), but I’ve always gotten the ick from their business practices.
These days there really isn’t anything special about their guitars there are a bajillion copycats that are almost as good, some that are better.
This kind of legal campaign just reeks of desperation from losing at competition. When you can’t win on merit and value, abuse the legal system. Gross. They’ve been on my shitlist for a long time and it looks like they’re staying there permanently. What a shame for such an influential cultural brand.
I am looking to get back into playing bass and have been completely out of the loop for about the last decade. When I started looking around to see what was available, it seems to me that guitar and bass prices are attached more to brand/model reputation than the actual objective and subjective quality of the instrument.
For example, the Squier and Fender basses with the same features are essentially identical. The Fender might have a higher quality finish and slightly better hardware (and is maybe made in a different country?) but I watched _many_ YouTube videos where professional bass players could not make one sound better than the other. Despite a 2x-3x price delta.
And most interestingly, Yamaha bass guitars are among the lowest cost for a brand-new bass, yet are also made surprisingly well and sound as good as some basses that cost an order of magnitude more.
This just further confirms my observation that in most any market, it always seems that the most popular brand is rarely the best overall value.
Playing a strat makes you feel like a rockstar. Simple as that
From the related story on the same site (not able to trademark the designs): https://www.guitarworld.com/music-industry/fender-legal-ruli...
The ruling comes 17 years after Fender was famously unsuccessful in its attempts to make its Stratocaster, Telecaster and Precision guitar body shapes a trademark in the US, decades after the designs were first produced.
That litigation process lasted five years, and demonstrated that countless companies had used the body shapes that Fender had sought to trademark. In the end, the courts ruled that the Stratocaster shape was “so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in a dictionary”.
Thomann has their own brand "Harley Benton" with a lot of Strat models. Also Telecasters. Will they be sued as well?
They're surprisingly good value for money too, if you go in with your eyes open. For the price they play pretty well.
I bought three Harley Benton models across the years. Fender is much better quality!
Gibson also have some history in this department - the PRS thing got a lot of press at the time
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhochberg/2022/09/20/gibs...
Oh, a bit late to sue the company I got my Strat-clone ~28 years ago. In Germany. They don't even exist anymore. :-)
Is it even legal to wait that long? Can anyone change their minds after decades of looking away? Customary law (esp. in Germany) might disagree with that ruling?
Can someone explain what the actual legal basis for this is? The shape of the guitar is very old (75+ years) and has been extensively copied before, so one would assume that patents and trademarks would not cover it.
> The shape of the guitar is very old (75+ years)
They are basing their claims on copyright[1], which is longer than 75+ years[2]. The first case they filed (in Germany, against a Chinese manufacturer) "validated" their copyright claims because the Chinese manufacturer did not turn up to court so the court ruled in Fender's favor in a default judgment. The small companies being sued could still fight Fender in court and overturn that default judgment, but court cases are expensive and Fender is massive. It's Fender abusing the courts to bully their competition.
[1] "The Dusseldorf court deemed that the Stratocaster design qualified as a copyrighted work of applied art under German and European law, thus prohibiting Yiwu Philharmonic Musical Instruments Co. from manufacturing, offering or distributing guitars featuring the Stratocaster body shape in Germany and the EU." https://www.guitarworld.com/music-industry/fender-legal-ruli...
[2] "The chosen term for a work was 70 years from the death of the author." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_law_of_the_European_... Leo Fender passed in 1991, so any copyrights attributable to him expire in the year 2061 (ie another 35 years from now, more than 100 years after the first strats were sold). I'm not 100% sure this is the copyright situation Fender asserted, but it's probably something not very far off from this. If you think this copyright duration is absolutely ludicrous, you are correct.
Trademarks are infinite though. Which makes sense, since otherwise anyone could produce "Coca Cola".
Patents and trademarks would not cover it, but fortunately this case was about copyright.
on the one hand this sucks on the other hand let a thousand schools of steinberger/strandberg-style weirdness bloom
I think Fender are idiots for doing this but I also wonder why companies copy the body style so slavishly. You would think makers of musical instruments would be a little more creative themselves.
I guess Steinberger guitars are protected by some branding too, also Steinberger seems to own some patents (maybe the headless/bridge combo?). No idea if they are still valid.
Agreed. I personally don't like the S-shaped ones. But ended up buying one cos there was none else in the store.
Fender suing Harley Benton could backfire spectacularly.
The reason Fender won in Germany was because the Chinese defendant did not show up. Thomann on the other hand will show up, is significantly larger than Fender and is no stranger to lawsuits.
How could this possibly be enforcable now after they let it go for 50+ years, and the design is ubiquitous? Prima facie absurd, I really hope the legal system is equipped to deal with this.
I’m always fascinated when companies in industries with extremely passionate customer bases make moves like this when if you just thought it through the probable timeline you would expect them to tread much more lightly. But that’s what you get with management that is out of touch with their customers and industry and only focused on short term numbers. Rather telling of the leadership of Fender than anything else
The biggest takeaway from this thread: Wow, nerds really don't know the difference between trademark and copyright
I feel your pain. Learning the basics of IP law is one of those "curses of knowledge"[1] because you can never not sound like a pedantic asshole whenever someone who doesn't know IP law tries to talk about IP law. "No, it's not a trademark suit, it doesn't matter if they've tried to defend it before. What, why are you even bringing up patents, it's not a specific, narrow invention, and it would've expired decades ago even if it was. Ahhh!"
[1] https://xkcd.com/1015/
Fender is dead.
this is a cringe attempt by people holding "legal rights" to something so far gone in history and precident to be just an embarassment and likely criminal persecution of ordinary crafts people building guitars.
If ,whatever hidden legal entity that controls the trade marks, was smart, they would be begging the best indipendent makers to colaberate in making true masterpiece guitars under just that idea, "custom made FOR fender" by person X, paying them a premium, and then re selling to the world market for whatever they can get.
Yeah, but that would be real work for someone who loves and understands guitars.
Being a serial patent/trademark troll is the private equity company's bread and butter.
Okay, none of the guitars on that page look like an "S" to me. What am I missing, and what are they protecting?
Sorry if I'm explaining the joke, but the term comes from Fender's guitars called Stratocasters. It's a popular guitar shape & configuration, so very many companies have made their own versions of it. However, Stratocaster is a trademark of Fender, so companies don't like to use that name to describe their products, to try to avoid Fender's lawsuits. So the industry has used the term "S-type" or "S-style" to refer to Stratocaster style guitars without actually using the trademarked name.
Similarly, "T-type" and "T-style" is used to refer to guitars similar to Fender's Telecaster guitars.
S = Stratocaster
Fender doesn’t even make the best strat and so overpriced, but I guess it’s subjective.
Yes, it's easier to settle a debate on the best Linux distro than on the best Strat.
For Mayonnaise, Billy Corgan used a 60$ guitar that produced unwanted feedback but kept the sounds into the final result which makes it so unique, it was the best in that situation.
The body has literally 0 effect on the sound of an electric guitar. Only the pickups matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
You can make the best product, or hire the best lawyers. If you've slipped on product quality relative to the competition, the lawyer option starts to look really good.
Unpopular opinion: I struggle to get angry at this. These are clearly rip-offs of the Stratocaster design. Sure, Fender makes crappy guitars nowadays and has mostly ruined their brand. Go make a new design. Let Fender die. Cases like this are exactly what copyright law is made for, and its a judicious and good application of it. I'm not going to feel sorry for these shops because they're small mom & pop shops when I would feel angry about it if it were some huge chinese factory doing it. The same laws apply to everyone.
Except the design was never copyrighted. It was created at a time when you had to register with the copyright office, which they didn't do. This is just an attempted money grab.
Guitarist and a hobby luthier here.
So to give some quick history, big traditional brands like Gibson and Fender entered a slump back in the mid 60s. The companies were bought out by Norlin and CBS at the height of the electric guitar popularity, and things took a turn for the worse when all the cost-cutting measures started becoming noticeable. Hence why 50s and 60s guitars from those brands cost a fortune today.
This decrease in quality ushered in an era of Japanese manufacturers producing high-quality copies of both Gibson and Fender guitars. They straight up copies the guitars, but often made them better than those available at the time (mid 70s, when both Gibson and Fender were at the lowest point).
Gibson acted fast, and filed lawsuits against those brands. Some big household brands today, like Ibanez, obliged and went onto making their own designs which became wildly popular. Other brands, like Tokai, Greco, Fernandes, and many others continued to make their Gibson and Fender copies for the Japanese market. AFAIK, those guitars could not be sold in the US due to the lawsuits.
Eventually both Gibson and Fender came out of the slump in the early 80s. By now, there was a whole cottage industry of boutique / custom guitar makers in the US making high-end stratocaster and telecaster (S- and T-style) type guitars - these brands were making guitars for the discerning customer, in a time where Fender didn't have any custom shop option. Schecter was one of the big emerging brands back then, making high-quality guitars for players like Mark Knopfler. You then got brands like Tom Anderson, Zion, Pensa-Suhr, and others. In the late 80s they all landed on using their own headstock shapes and slightly different S- and T-style bodies. Probably to avoid paying licensing fees to Fender.
Traditionally, the only thing that was completely off-limits, used to be the headstock. If you made a Fender style headstock, or open-book Gibson style headstock, you'd hear from their lawyers - that's just how it always was.
Brands like Charvel, which made their name in the early 80s by using Stratocaster headstocks, did not produce any US made guitars with such a headstock until they were acquired by Fender FMIC 20 years later. Even smaller boutique builders had a thriving industry making Charvel "Strathead" replicas back in the 90s / early 00s. But the bodies they used were very clearly S- and T- style bodies. Again, Fender didn't seem to bother. Fender tried to register (in the US) their most common bodies in 2009, but that was rejected.
So the long short has been that for all these years, pretty much since the 60s and 70s, the bodies have been more or less "public domain", in the sense the Fender didn't go after anyone that made those bodies. And again in 2009, they failed to trademark the body designs.
In the 2000s/2010s guitar production in China really took off, and became the leading producer of cheap guitars. Prior to that, it used to be Indonesia. Prior to that, Korea. Prior to that, Taiwan. Prior to that, Japan.
The sheer production capacity, and price, made it possible for pretty much any in-store brand or budget brand to pump out S- and T-style guitars. For every US made Fender, there are probably 100 Chinese made for brands like Harley Benton. And then you also have the straight up replicas sold on AliExpress, Temu, and what have you. These also use to Fender headstock.
All this has lead to where we are now. Fender sued some Chinese company, won by no-show in Germany, and are now trying to go after all brands that use the S- and T-style *body shape*.
Why is this huge? Well, for one the body shape is by now so generic, it would be like Ford suddenly suing all car manufacturers in the world because they are creating cars with a generic sedan or station wagon body design. If we continue with the car analogy, think of the headstock as a very distinctive thing on a car - like the logo and front grill. Of course, some bodies are unique - like flying V, Explorer, Les Paul.
But for the lack of a better explanation, history just made the Fender Strat and Tele styles generic. Probably due to the lack of enforcement from Fender, and patents expiring in the 60s/70s for those things.
Another reason that I don't think anyone's commented on is that it wasn't until the very late 1960's that the Stratocaster really took off. That was because of Jimi Hendrix adopting it. Before that, the Jazzmaster was Fender's top-of-the-line guitar; the Strat was an afterthought. After Hendrix died, players like Eric Clapton were inspired to make the Strat their #1 guitar. Because of all that, Fender didn't think they needed to license the body shape.
Here we go again: as ever, intellectual property law creates a net loss to society.
Here we go again: as ever, intellectual property law creates a net loss to society. - marssaxman2
You should upvote my comment. I'm marssaxman2, which is 2 better than 1! I make better comments
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