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Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

131 points by rectang 5mo ago

rectang 5mo ago
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.
- the__alchemist 5mo ago
  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.
  - gchamonlive 5mo ago
    Maybe someone new to music and guitar would mistake them for the real thing, but these copies have different hand styles and they have neither the Stratocaster nor the fender logo. This is a non-issue. The actual problem lies within fender itself. Not only it's aggressively protecting a old design, fender itself is guilty of being misleading when it splits its product line into multiple brands that's often confusing for the consumer: fender squire, squire by fender, the regular one, fender custom shop, American vintage etc... which is only discernible by the price.
    - piltdownman 5mo ago
      The problem is some PE has read up on the FujiGen Gakki guitars of the 70s and thought they could strike rich with a test case in a soft German court - and they were right.
      - bobchadwick 5mo ago
        I just finished restoring the Univox Coily that was sitting in my parents' basement for the past 25 years. Every time I step into the room and see it I do a double take because it looks so cool. (It sounds pretty great, too, especially through my Kay 703, aka the widowmaker.)
      - dkuntz2 5mo ago
        it's yet to be proven that they are right, the only thing they won in the german court is a default ruling because they picked a defendant who they knew wasn't going to show up so they could get a default ruling. The actual merits of the case have yet to be tried.
  - sandworm101 5mo ago
    Because two things look the same, even identical, does not mean one copied the other. These are useful, practical, objects. A honda and a toyota me be virtually identical (same size, weight, door, number of wheels etc) but nobody would call them copies. And if they did, they are both copies of an ancient, out-of-copyright, merc rather than each other.
    - the__alchemist 5mo ago
      I am with you. I believe this is a matter of degree vs kind. Can you see how there are truly many instruments which deliberately mimic details of the Fender designs, and not the broad solid-body guitar design principles? I brought this up in the earlier post: I think the difference is most clear when looking at companies that have both their own designs, and Fender-style designs. Cosmetic and arbitrary features are mimicked, like pick guard design, precise pickup style and position, control layout etc.
      - otherme123 5mo ago
        When I first read this, I thought Fender was after anything S-shaped, like the superstrats that makes Ibanez. Then I went to some of the makers, like LSL, and they are making not just strato-shaped guitars but almost exact copies including the same style brigde-vibrato (when everyone is building with Evertune or Floyd), the same single coil pickups, the same knobs, the same cable socket in the front, same pickguard, same dot fret markers, same neck insertion (when everybody is using better methods for top models). They paint the guitars mimicking Fender colour schemes and even painted as aged Fenders. Solar Guitars has a category called "S", but despite having the general shape of a Strato, the similarities end there. And they are not being threatened. This is not "all cars have 4 wheels". This is "lets make an exact copy of a Ferrari painted in Ferrari red, that even seasoned car enthusiast would have a hard time to tell appart from a Ferrari". That said, trademarking a guitar shape that they forgot to trademark a century ago is a bad move.
        sandworm101 5mo ago
        I doubt they could trademark this. Just like Lego, you cannot trademark a functional thing. This is copyright.
  - piltdownman 5mo ago
    In terms of ergonomics, resonance and so on, there's not many terribly optimal solidbody electronic guitar shapes that deviate from the Les Paul/Strat/Tele trinity. Explorers, Flying Vs and the like are basically genre-oddities for aesthetics. Guitars are not about aesthetics, otherwise Fender wouldn't have marques like Squier or ranges like Highway One to differentiate their low-quality tiers.
    - snide 5mo ago
      > Guitars are not about aesthetics My wife used to work at Acoustic Guitar magazine. She said the most common sales line to sell a guitar at Guitar Center was "it looks good on you". The sound of guitars might not be aesthetics, but in regards to sales, it most certainly is. Everyone plays the same guitars because they grew up seeing their idols play those guitars.
      - Hamuko 5mo ago
        Yeah, I'd say guitars are heavily based on aesthetics, but not entirely. One of the reasons why I switched from a Les Paul, which was the guitar shape I loved the most before I started playing, to a Stratocaster was that the Stratocaster was just that much more comfortable. The LP body is basically just a block of wood with a cutout for your hand in comparison to the contoured body of the Stratocaster. If I had to buy an LP-style guitar again, I'd want at least a belly cut on it.
        jen20 5mo ago
        Look into a "Recording" model Les Paul (or the newer "Iridium" model if you don't care about the low-impedance electronics) - they have exactly that. The main complaint is usually the weight though - of the two I have one is 11lbs and one is 15lbs (!!!).
    - liveoneggs 5mo ago
      If guitars were about ergonomics, technology, and sound they would be copying strandbergs! These vintage designs are all about nostalgia and looks. Anyway Bo Diddley demonstrated the most optimal body shape for holding electronics. :)
  - lenerdenator 5mo ago
    > 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. That's basically what Fender does with Squier. Arguably they invented that move back in the 80s. I think it's more of a case of the whole market going stale. The biggest driver of guitar sales, rock music, is still relevant but not the primary driver of culture that it once was. You can only increase the playability of a guitar so much. In a lot of ways, it's a commodity now, and the owners of Fender - some investment firm - are trying to make good on their bet by either ignoring that fact or trying to make them not a commodity again.
    - whstl 5mo ago
      Yeah. Fender is even manufacturing Fender-branded guitars in Indonesia, and IIRC for a while they even had a few China-made models. Plus Mexico, Korea and Japanese models have been here forever.
      - nyrikki 5mo ago
        The Modern Player Marauder was one of the few Chinese made, Fender branded guitars. I have one and outside of the frets, which wore out, and lower quality fake bone nut it was higher quality than the Mexican ones, when that plant was having QC issues. Funny enough Fender got in trouble with the Marauder name which is owned by Gibson.
  - dylan604 5mo ago
    > they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end That's a huge difference though. Copycats are not licensed versions. Licensing usually involves fees but also an agreement of what can and cannot be done. Copycats do none of that and just do what they want. Fender does seem late to the party with this and it really does feel like not offering a license instead of trying to kill off the copy cats after taking no action for such a long time is just patent troll level nonsense.
- criddell 5mo ago
  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.
  - Hamuko 5mo ago
    Leo also copied his own designs later on after he sold Fender and started other guitar companies. For example the G&L ASAT looks pretty much exactly like a Fender Telecaster.
    - Dracophoenix 5mo ago
      G&L is no more as of last year. Fender acquired the Leo Fender name and potentially a whole host of other IP from the now defunct company, which may or may not include guitar designs like the ASAT (itself based on the Telecaster) among others.
tensegrist 5mo ago
on the one hand this sucks on the other hand let a thousand schools of steinberger/strandberg-style weirdness bloom
- RaSoJo 5mo ago
  Agreed. I personally don't like the S-shaped ones. But ended up buying one cos there was none else in the store.
- ofrzeta 5mo ago
  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.
- criddell 5mo ago
  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.
  - coldpie 5mo ago
    It's a pretty restrictive design space. The Stratocaster shape is based on the centuries-old shape of acoustic guitars. The lower dip of the "hip" of the guitar shape serves a practical purpose, in allowing it to rest on your leg when playing seated. The upper dip mirrors the lower hip aesthetically and removes weight. The cutaways in the upper bout allows you to access the higher frets. At that point there's not a whole lot of design variation left without sacrificing some functionality (eg the Flying V shape is not really playable while seated), and honestly most of that design space has already been explored, too. The strat shape is so common because, well, it's a really good and obvious design for an electric guitar, which is why it was one of the very first. If you stray very far from one of the handful of established designs, you pretty much just end up with a worse guitar.
    - Sindisil 5mo ago
cassianoleal 5mo ago
> 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.
- criddell 5mo ago
  Plus the Chinese firm didn't even show up to defend themselves, so it was a default judgement.
  - jpfromlondon 5mo ago
    I suspect because the Chinese firm in question was a fabrication of FMIC for exactly this purpose.
    - BJones12 5mo ago
      There are a lot of real Chinese firms (factories) that make unapproved copies including body shape, headstock shape, logo, and brand name.
      - jpfromlondon 5mo ago
        There are, making such a conspiracy all the easier to perpetrate.
    - toast0 5mo ago
      There certainly could be collusion. But it could just as easily be a Chinese music instrument storefront has little reason to show up in court. Worst case, they setup a new name when shipments start getting confiscated. Losing a few cheap guitars at customs and restarting SEO is probably cheaper than foreign lawyers. The storefront in question [1] (assuming there's not a name collision) lists a lot of stuff, more effort than I would put in on a sockpuppet store; it does have a nice name, but it's only been on Aliexpress for two years, so not a lot of brand legacy to throw away if need be. [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1103599226 https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1103599226
zkanda 5mo ago
Fender doesn’t even make the best strat and so overpriced, but I guess it’s subjective.
- whynotmaybe 5mo ago
  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.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    Exactly! Tom Morello used a $50 plywood guitar played through a 20 watt solid state practice amp on the track "Tire Me" and won a Grammy.
- btilly 5mo ago
  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.
- tiahura 5mo ago
  The body has literally 0 effect on the sound of an electric guitar. Only the pickups matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
  - bityard 5mo ago
    Well, the pickups and a few other things (like having volume controls), but yeah. That was a fun watch and confirmed much of what I had previously suspected. But to be fair, overall quality involves more than just sound. The big one for me is, how long will it stay in tune? And in general, have good action, be solid and hold together over the years? Tuned strings create quite a lot of static force which becomes dynamic when you play it. Some uber-cheap bass guitars I played never had a hope. Wouldn't stay in tune and action was all wonky and couldn't be corrected for, even with kludges like shims in various places.
ofrzeta 5mo ago
Thomann has their own brand "Harley Benton" with a lot of Strat models. Also Telecasters. Will they be sued as well?
- deleted 5mo ago
  [deleted]
- ablation 5mo ago
  They're surprisingly good value for money too, if you go in with your eyes open. For the price they play pretty well.
  - criddell 5mo ago
    Even very cheap electric guitars are surprisingly good these days. As long as you are willing to pay for (or do) a full set up, you really can't go wrong. Justin Sandercoe (from the JustinGuitar YouTube channel) bought the cheapest electric guitar from Amazon and did a series of videos [1] with a guitar tech friend of his where they did a complete set up of the guitar. Several times through the videos both of them commented on how surprisingly good the guitar was. FWIW, the guitar they bought had the strat body shape. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SHE_xooyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SHE_xooyU
  - whstl 5mo ago
    Indeed. I've had great experiences with them. It's basically $500 guitars sold for half or even a third of the price, probably made at the same factories that Fender makes their new line in Indonesia. My $1500 Gibson Les Paul DC Junior is full of problems compared to its $150 Harley Benton DC Jr counterpart. The Gibson pickup covers are WAY too high for the bridge, the Gibson pickguard feels ultra-cheap compared to the Harley Benton, Gibson finish is acceptable but the cheap one is satin and just feels better... Weighs the same, sounds the same. Just a 10x difference. Oh well.
- punkbit 5mo ago
  I bought three Harley Benton models across the years. Fender is much better quality!
metalman 5mo ago
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.
- rwmj 5mo ago
  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.
Aboutplants 5mo ago
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
rwmj 5mo ago
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.
- boxed 5mo ago
  Trademarks are infinite though. Which makes sense, since otherwise anyone could produce "Coca Cola".
  - ulbu 5mo ago
    how is guitar shape a trademark? edit: thanks for the responses!
    - bluGill 5mo ago
      You can trademark any shape. However by not protecting their trademark over the years (if they every had one - which I doubt) they lost it.
    - rwmj 5mo ago
      Design rights[1] are a thing. However they need to be continuously defended. You can't let competitors make your designs (without license) for decades and then suddenly turn around and try to enforce the right, as seems to be the case here. Plus in the EU there are overall limits, apparently 25 years. This is why I'm asking what the legal basis is for this case. It seems unlikely to be legally sound. Probably the German court made a mistake, and the company being sued should ignore Fender. (Not legal advice!) Edit: Someone else just posted that Fender is now owned by private equity, so it's the usual PE playbook. A sad end to a famous brand. Edit#2: Seems like the German court ruling was a default judgement because the other party failed to show up. So nothing to see here. Fender has no realistic case. [1] In the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_design
    - boxed 5mo ago
      It can be. But in this case they haven't defended such a case for decades, so it seems a court should throw that argument out.
scrumper 5mo ago
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.
- ricardobayes 5mo ago
  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.
  - deleted 5mo ago
    [deleted]
  - CocaKoala 5mo ago
    A quick browse of Sweetwater shows 689 different s-style body guitars, four of which are made by Fender under the Squier label. The other 685 different varients are made by companies that I'm not immediately identifying as Fender or Fender-owned. Anecdotally, that doesn't seem significantly different from the status quo I remember 10-15 years ago when I was actively guitar shopping. The body style has been widely used and generic for decades.
  - ses1984 5mo ago
    This was already litigated decades ago in the USA, fender trademarked the headstock and lost in on the body. The bodies have been copied for 60ish years already, basically as long as they existed. Fender tried to trademark body shapes decades after and they lost on appeal in 2009. A barely related ruling in the EU which has very different copyright and trademark law is being used as the basis for this suit.
toast0 5mo ago
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-25/ https://wellstrungguitars.com/guitar/stratocaster-sunburst-2...
shrubble 5mo ago
From the related story on the same site (not able to trademark the designs): https://www.guitarworld.com/music-industry/fender-legal-ruling-protect-stratocaster-body-design 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”.
throwatdem12311 5mo 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.
- bityard 5mo ago
  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.
  - coldpie 5mo ago
    You're pretty much correct, yeah. If you want to know what the actual benefit to playing a more expensive and/or name-brand instrument is, it's because it's largely a signal to others about your self. Playing a recognizable brand or a obscure-but-expensive brand can show to others that you're serious & knowledgeable about the hobby, instead of just playing a $150 strat clone you bought off Amazon. If you want to make money off of it, it's also a sign to your potential customers that you know what you're doing. Above like $500, they all play pretty much the same, but they make different statements about your self. It's up to you how much value that has to you personally, but please don't make the mistake of being surprised that others put a lot of value on how others perceive them. That little fact accounts for an absolutely enormous chunk of economy activity, it'd be silly to write it off as unimportant. Yamaha makes fantastic stuff, they're a great choice.
myself248 5mo ago
Okay, none of the guitars on that page look like an "S" to me. What am I missing, and what are they protecting?
- criddell 5mo ago
  S = Stratocaster
- coldpie 5mo ago
  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.
  - myself248 5mo ago
    Thank you, yes, that's exactly the detail I was missing! It's a euphemism for a word that starts with an S, not at all related to the typographical form of the letter S. Alright, my Trogdor-shaped guitar might happen after all...
spamizbad 5mo ago
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 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.
- plasticsoprano 5mo ago
  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.
  - rhplus 5mo ago
    > So why not license the shape then? Because - until it makes its way through the courts - it’s not established that Fender has the rights to claim ownership of on the shape in the first place. In the US, there’s three routes for that - design patent, trade dress and artistic copyright. AFAIK they don’t have a design patent. Trade dress is hard to prove association - would most people on the street say “yep, that’s 100% a Stratocaster” if they say the outline? Probably not. The shape isn’t separate from the functionality so artistic copyright hasn’t upheld either. The fact that Fender has not successfully enforced copyright concerns for over 70 years is also a sign that they never had IP protection on the shape.
marssaxman 5mo ago
Here we go again: as ever, intellectual property law creates a net loss to society.
- butlike 5mo ago
  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
nikanj 5mo ago
The biggest takeaway from this thread: Wow, nerds really don't know the difference between trademark and copyright
- coldpie 5mo ago
  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/ https://xkcd.com/1015/
arprocter 5mo ago
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/gibsons-strumming-the-blues-in-litigation-over-iconic-guitar-shapes/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhochberg/2022/09/20/gibs...
827a 5mo ago
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.
- amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
  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.
GuestFAUniverse 5mo ago
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?
throwa356262 5mo ago
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.
ceheaaf 5mo ago
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.
manvel_hn 5mo ago
[dead]
TrackerFF 5mo ago
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.

131 points by rectang 5mo ago

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.

the__alchemist 5mo ago
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.
- gchamonlive 5mo ago
  Maybe someone new to music and guitar would mistake them for the real thing, but these copies have different hand styles and they have neither the Stratocaster nor the fender logo. This is a non-issue. The actual problem lies within fender itself. Not only it's aggressively protecting a old design, fender itself is guilty of being misleading when it splits its product line into multiple brands that's often confusing for the consumer: fender squire, squire by fender, the regular one, fender custom shop, American vintage etc... which is only discernible by the price.
  - piltdownman 5mo ago
    The problem is some PE has read up on the FujiGen Gakki guitars of the 70s and thought they could strike rich with a test case in a soft German court - and they were right.
    - bobchadwick 5mo ago
      I just finished restoring the Univox Coily that was sitting in my parents' basement for the past 25 years. Every time I step into the room and see it I do a double take because it looks so cool. (It sounds pretty great, too, especially through my Kay 703, aka the widowmaker.)
    - dkuntz2 5mo ago
      it's yet to be proven that they are right, the only thing they won in the german court is a default ruling because they picked a defendant who they knew wasn't going to show up so they could get a default ruling. The actual merits of the case have yet to be tried.
- sandworm101 5mo ago
  Because two things look the same, even identical, does not mean one copied the other. These are useful, practical, objects. A honda and a toyota me be virtually identical (same size, weight, door, number of wheels etc) but nobody would call them copies. And if they did, they are both copies of an ancient, out-of-copyright, merc rather than each other.
  - the__alchemist 5mo ago
    I am with you. I believe this is a matter of degree vs kind. Can you see how there are truly many instruments which deliberately mimic details of the Fender designs, and not the broad solid-body guitar design principles? I brought this up in the earlier post: I think the difference is most clear when looking at companies that have both their own designs, and Fender-style designs. Cosmetic and arbitrary features are mimicked, like pick guard design, precise pickup style and position, control layout etc.
    - otherme123 5mo ago
      When I first read this, I thought Fender was after anything S-shaped, like the superstrats that makes Ibanez. Then I went to some of the makers, like LSL, and they are making not just strato-shaped guitars but almost exact copies including the same style brigde-vibrato (when everyone is building with Evertune or Floyd), the same single coil pickups, the same knobs, the same cable socket in the front, same pickguard, same dot fret markers, same neck insertion (when everybody is using better methods for top models). They paint the guitars mimicking Fender colour schemes and even painted as aged Fenders. Solar Guitars has a category called "S", but despite having the general shape of a Strato, the similarities end there. And they are not being threatened. This is not "all cars have 4 wheels". This is "lets make an exact copy of a Ferrari painted in Ferrari red, that even seasoned car enthusiast would have a hard time to tell appart from a Ferrari". That said, trademarking a guitar shape that they forgot to trademark a century ago is a bad move.
      - sandworm101 5mo ago
        I doubt they could trademark this. Just like Lego, you cannot trademark a functional thing. This is copyright.
- piltdownman 5mo ago
  In terms of ergonomics, resonance and so on, there's not many terribly optimal solidbody electronic guitar shapes that deviate from the Les Paul/Strat/Tele trinity. Explorers, Flying Vs and the like are basically genre-oddities for aesthetics. Guitars are not about aesthetics, otherwise Fender wouldn't have marques like Squier or ranges like Highway One to differentiate their low-quality tiers.
  - snide 5mo ago
    > Guitars are not about aesthetics My wife used to work at Acoustic Guitar magazine. She said the most common sales line to sell a guitar at Guitar Center was "it looks good on you". The sound of guitars might not be aesthetics, but in regards to sales, it most certainly is. Everyone plays the same guitars because they grew up seeing their idols play those guitars.
    - Hamuko 5mo ago
      Yeah, I'd say guitars are heavily based on aesthetics, but not entirely. One of the reasons why I switched from a Les Paul, which was the guitar shape I loved the most before I started playing, to a Stratocaster was that the Stratocaster was just that much more comfortable. The LP body is basically just a block of wood with a cutout for your hand in comparison to the contoured body of the Stratocaster. If I had to buy an LP-style guitar again, I'd want at least a belly cut on it.
      - jen20 5mo ago
        Look into a "Recording" model Les Paul (or the newer "Iridium" model if you don't care about the low-impedance electronics) - they have exactly that. The main complaint is usually the weight though - of the two I have one is 11lbs and one is 15lbs (!!!).
  - liveoneggs 5mo ago
    If guitars were about ergonomics, technology, and sound they would be copying strandbergs! These vintage designs are all about nostalgia and looks. Anyway Bo Diddley demonstrated the most optimal body shape for holding electronics. :)
- lenerdenator 5mo ago
  > 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. That's basically what Fender does with Squier. Arguably they invented that move back in the 80s. I think it's more of a case of the whole market going stale. The biggest driver of guitar sales, rock music, is still relevant but not the primary driver of culture that it once was. You can only increase the playability of a guitar so much. In a lot of ways, it's a commodity now, and the owners of Fender - some investment firm - are trying to make good on their bet by either ignoring that fact or trying to make them not a commodity again.
  - whstl 5mo ago
    Yeah. Fender is even manufacturing Fender-branded guitars in Indonesia, and IIRC for a while they even had a few China-made models. Plus Mexico, Korea and Japanese models have been here forever.
    - nyrikki 5mo ago
      The Modern Player Marauder was one of the few Chinese made, Fender branded guitars. I have one and outside of the frets, which wore out, and lower quality fake bone nut it was higher quality than the Mexican ones, when that plant was having QC issues. Funny enough Fender got in trouble with the Marauder name which is owned by Gibson.
- dylan604 5mo ago
  > they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end That's a huge difference though. Copycats are not licensed versions. Licensing usually involves fees but also an agreement of what can and cannot be done. Copycats do none of that and just do what they want. Fender does seem late to the party with this and it really does feel like not offering a license instead of trying to kill off the copy cats after taking no action for such a long time is just patent troll level nonsense.
criddell 5mo ago
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.
- Hamuko 5mo ago
  Leo also copied his own designs later on after he sold Fender and started other guitar companies. For example the G&L ASAT looks pretty much exactly like a Fender Telecaster.
  - Dracophoenix 5mo ago
    G&L is no more as of last year. Fender acquired the Leo Fender name and potentially a whole host of other IP from the now defunct company, which may or may not include guitar designs like the ASAT (itself based on the Telecaster) among others.

tensegrist 5mo ago

on the one hand this sucks on the other hand let a thousand schools of steinberger/strandberg-style weirdness bloom

RaSoJo 5mo ago
Agreed. I personally don't like the S-shaped ones. But ended up buying one cos there was none else in the store.
ofrzeta 5mo ago
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.
criddell 5mo ago
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.
- coldpie 5mo ago
  It's a pretty restrictive design space. The Stratocaster shape is based on the centuries-old shape of acoustic guitars. The lower dip of the "hip" of the guitar shape serves a practical purpose, in allowing it to rest on your leg when playing seated. The upper dip mirrors the lower hip aesthetically and removes weight. The cutaways in the upper bout allows you to access the higher frets. At that point there's not a whole lot of design variation left without sacrificing some functionality (eg the Flying V shape is not really playable while seated), and honestly most of that design space has already been explored, too. The strat shape is so common because, well, it's a really good and obvious design for an electric guitar, which is why it was one of the very first. If you stray very far from one of the handful of established designs, you pretty much just end up with a worse guitar.
  - Sindisil 5mo ago

cassianoleal 5mo ago

> 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.

criddell 5mo ago
Plus the Chinese firm didn't even show up to defend themselves, so it was a default judgement.
- jpfromlondon 5mo ago
  I suspect because the Chinese firm in question was a fabrication of FMIC for exactly this purpose.
  - BJones12 5mo ago
    There are a lot of real Chinese firms (factories) that make unapproved copies including body shape, headstock shape, logo, and brand name.
    - jpfromlondon 5mo ago
      There are, making such a conspiracy all the easier to perpetrate.
  - toast0 5mo ago
    There certainly could be collusion. But it could just as easily be a Chinese music instrument storefront has little reason to show up in court. Worst case, they setup a new name when shipments start getting confiscated. Losing a few cheap guitars at customs and restarting SEO is probably cheaper than foreign lawyers. The storefront in question [1] (assuming there's not a name collision) lists a lot of stuff, more effort than I would put in on a sockpuppet store; it does have a nice name, but it's only been on Aliexpress for two years, so not a lot of brand legacy to throw away if need be. [1] https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1103599226 https://www.aliexpress.com/store/1103599226

zkanda 5mo ago

Fender doesn’t even make the best strat and so overpriced, but I guess it’s subjective.

whynotmaybe 5mo ago
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.
- criddell 5mo ago
  Exactly! Tom Morello used a $50 plywood guitar played through a 20 watt solid state practice amp on the track "Tire Me" and won a Grammy.
btilly 5mo ago
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.
tiahura 5mo ago
The body has literally 0 effect on the sound of an electric guitar. Only the pickups matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
- bityard 5mo ago
  Well, the pickups and a few other things (like having volume controls), but yeah. That was a fun watch and confirmed much of what I had previously suspected. But to be fair, overall quality involves more than just sound. The big one for me is, how long will it stay in tune? And in general, have good action, be solid and hold together over the years? Tuned strings create quite a lot of static force which becomes dynamic when you play it. Some uber-cheap bass guitars I played never had a hope. Wouldn't stay in tune and action was all wonky and couldn't be corrected for, even with kludges like shims in various places.

ofrzeta 5mo ago

Thomann has their own brand "Harley Benton" with a lot of Strat models. Also Telecasters. Will they be sued as well?

deleted 5mo ago
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ablation 5mo ago
They're surprisingly good value for money too, if you go in with your eyes open. For the price they play pretty well.
- criddell 5mo ago
  Even very cheap electric guitars are surprisingly good these days. As long as you are willing to pay for (or do) a full set up, you really can't go wrong. Justin Sandercoe (from the JustinGuitar YouTube channel) bought the cheapest electric guitar from Amazon and did a series of videos [1] with a guitar tech friend of his where they did a complete set up of the guitar. Several times through the videos both of them commented on how surprisingly good the guitar was. FWIW, the guitar they bought had the strat body shape. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SHE_xooyU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-0SHE_xooyU
- whstl 5mo ago
  Indeed. I've had great experiences with them. It's basically $500 guitars sold for half or even a third of the price, probably made at the same factories that Fender makes their new line in Indonesia. My $1500 Gibson Les Paul DC Junior is full of problems compared to its $150 Harley Benton DC Jr counterpart. The Gibson pickup covers are WAY too high for the bridge, the Gibson pickguard feels ultra-cheap compared to the Harley Benton, Gibson finish is acceptable but the cheap one is satin and just feels better... Weighs the same, sounds the same. Just a 10x difference. Oh well.
punkbit 5mo ago
I bought three Harley Benton models across the years. Fender is much better quality!

metalman 5mo ago

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.

rwmj 5mo ago
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.

Aboutplants 5mo ago

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

rwmj 5mo ago

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.

boxed 5mo ago
Trademarks are infinite though. Which makes sense, since otherwise anyone could produce "Coca Cola".
- ulbu 5mo ago
  how is guitar shape a trademark? edit: thanks for the responses!
  - bluGill 5mo ago
    You can trademark any shape. However by not protecting their trademark over the years (if they every had one - which I doubt) they lost it.
  - rwmj 5mo ago
    Design rights[1] are a thing. However they need to be continuously defended. You can't let competitors make your designs (without license) for decades and then suddenly turn around and try to enforce the right, as seems to be the case here. Plus in the EU there are overall limits, apparently 25 years. This is why I'm asking what the legal basis is for this case. It seems unlikely to be legally sound. Probably the German court made a mistake, and the company being sued should ignore Fender. (Not legal advice!) Edit: Someone else just posted that Fender is now owned by private equity, so it's the usual PE playbook. A sad end to a famous brand. Edit#2: Seems like the German court ruling was a default judgement because the other party failed to show up. So nothing to see here. Fender has no realistic case. [1] In the EU: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_design https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_Union_design
  - boxed 5mo ago
    It can be. But in this case they haven't defended such a case for decades, so it seems a court should throw that argument out.

scrumper 5mo ago

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.

ricardobayes 5mo ago
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.
- deleted 5mo ago
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- CocaKoala 5mo ago
  A quick browse of Sweetwater shows 689 different s-style body guitars, four of which are made by Fender under the Squier label. The other 685 different varients are made by companies that I'm not immediately identifying as Fender or Fender-owned. Anecdotally, that doesn't seem significantly different from the status quo I remember 10-15 years ago when I was actively guitar shopping. The body style has been widely used and generic for decades.
- ses1984 5mo ago
  This was already litigated decades ago in the USA, fender trademarked the headstock and lost in on the body. The bodies have been copied for 60ish years already, basically as long as they existed. Fender tried to trademark body shapes decades after and they lost on appeal in 2009. A barely related ruling in the EU which has very different copyright and trademark law is being used as the basis for this suit.

toast0 5mo ago

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-25/ https://wellstrungguitars.com/guitar/stratocaster-sunburst-2...

shrubble 5mo ago

From the related story on the same site (not able to trademark the designs): https://www.guitarworld.com/music-industry/fender-legal-ruling-protect-stratocaster-body-design 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”.

throwatdem12311 5mo 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.

bityard 5mo ago
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.
- coldpie 5mo ago
  You're pretty much correct, yeah. If you want to know what the actual benefit to playing a more expensive and/or name-brand instrument is, it's because it's largely a signal to others about your self. Playing a recognizable brand or a obscure-but-expensive brand can show to others that you're serious & knowledgeable about the hobby, instead of just playing a $150 strat clone you bought off Amazon. If you want to make money off of it, it's also a sign to your potential customers that you know what you're doing. Above like $500, they all play pretty much the same, but they make different statements about your self. It's up to you how much value that has to you personally, but please don't make the mistake of being surprised that others put a lot of value on how others perceive them. That little fact accounts for an absolutely enormous chunk of economy activity, it'd be silly to write it off as unimportant. Yamaha makes fantastic stuff, they're a great choice.

myself248 5mo ago

Okay, none of the guitars on that page look like an "S" to me. What am I missing, and what are they protecting?

criddell 5mo ago
S = Stratocaster
coldpie 5mo ago
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.
- myself248 5mo ago
  Thank you, yes, that's exactly the detail I was missing! It's a euphemism for a word that starts with an S, not at all related to the typographical form of the letter S. Alright, my Trogdor-shaped guitar might happen after all...

spamizbad 5mo ago

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 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.

plasticsoprano 5mo ago
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.
- rhplus 5mo ago
  > So why not license the shape then? Because - until it makes its way through the courts - it’s not established that Fender has the rights to claim ownership of on the shape in the first place. In the US, there’s three routes for that - design patent, trade dress and artistic copyright. AFAIK they don’t have a design patent. Trade dress is hard to prove association - would most people on the street say “yep, that’s 100% a Stratocaster” if they say the outline? Probably not. The shape isn’t separate from the functionality so artistic copyright hasn’t upheld either. The fact that Fender has not successfully enforced copyright concerns for over 70 years is also a sign that they never had IP protection on the shape.

marssaxman 5mo ago

Here we go again: as ever, intellectual property law creates a net loss to society.

butlike 5mo ago
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

nikanj 5mo ago

The biggest takeaway from this thread: Wow, nerds really don't know the difference between trademark and copyright

coldpie 5mo ago
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/ https://xkcd.com/1015/

arprocter 5mo ago

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/gibsons-strumming-the-blues-in-litigation-over-iconic-guitar-shapes/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhochberg/2022/09/20/gibs...

827a 5mo ago

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.

amanaplanacanal 5mo ago
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.

GuestFAUniverse 5mo ago

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?

throwa356262 5mo ago

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.

ceheaaf 5mo ago

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.

manvel_hn 5mo ago

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TrackerFF 5mo ago

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.