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.
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.
I think you're both right.
Marketing is very effective, and lots of people are willing to pay a little bit more for a particular brand.
On the other hand there's also lots of people who will look for the best value for the money, or want to support smaller luthiers.
As you mentioned usually with experience one gravitates towards the second group, but most instrument purchases is entry level gear for beginners.
Disclaimer: coming from classical guitar world, but have noticed largely the same pattern, eg someone paying more for an Alhambra when a regional luthier will be less. Not that Alhambra is a bad brand, just that those marketing salaries have to come from somewhere!
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?
I agree with you due to cnc and production being relatively standardized
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.
> they're getting squeezed from the low end, sub-$1K part of the market coming from China and Indonesia.
This was true in the 80s with Japanese competition as well (the last time Fender tried putting the body shapes back in the box) - Tokei and friends were making vastly better guitars than even the American Fender production at that point.
The way Fender survived was by buying the top producers and forming Squier guitars as their entry level.
> It's a shame to see a once-great American brand get cooked by resorting to lawfare instead of QC.
They did this in the past too, largely over the headstock shape. My "main" Stratocaster-type guitars (despite owning several genuine Fenders of different vintages) are a pair of Levinson Blade R4s - one has the Fender-shape headstock and the other has a modified version from after Levinson got sued in the 90s.
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.
> 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.
In the US, I'm pretty sure they have no protection. They lost a US case to establish a trademark in 2009 [1] (2009 article title says copyright, but text is about a trademark suit). A design patent would have expired, unless it was filed in 1954 and was pending until recently or is still pending... US patents filed before 1995 don't start their validity period until issuance, but that'd be a big stretch.
It's possible there's a US copyright claim, but on a 1954 design, you would have to have registered it, marked the works with the copyright (on at least most of the copies), and timely renewed. There's also, IMHO, a solid question of if US copyright applies to the shape of a guitar. If they had a strong case, I think they would have tried to enforce on it in 2009 when they tried to enforce on trademark.
There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that the first electric guitar demo was a bunch of strings nailed to some basic lumber and it received a negative reception. The designer went home, tore apart his acoustic guitar and mounted the electronics inside. The sound was not changed by this. The critical reception however was much improved. And the rest is history.
The shape might not be purely functional—and that seems to be the basis for their attempted lawsuit.
It’s a true story, and it’s about Les Paul and “the log.”
The "log" (generally dated to 1941) is the railroad sleeper ("tie" for Americans?) with wings made in the Epiphone factory in Manhattan attached to the side, and is in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. This is the guitar that Gibson turned down until Fender and Bigsby (via Merle Travis) popularized the solid body guitar.
The predecessor was a single string on a piece of actual rail and two spikes, amplified by a telephone receiver in the mid-late 1920s.
well, in the US, those shapes were ruled public domain.
in Germany, Fender recently won a default ruling because a chinese counterfeiter didn't even show up in court, and they're now using that to go after anyone selling in the EU, even though that's not really what that case win means. But private equity is going to private equity.
Fender does this with their headstock design for replacement necks only. However they forbid license-holding manufacturers from both selling a complete guitar with a Fender headstock shape and even showing the guitar neck on a finished guitar during the sale process.
They'd have to do something more complex like licensing the shape + name at the same time, since they do own "Stratocaster". Not sure how big of a demand there is for the name though, or if Fender was even interested in licensing that part.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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 (!!!).
This is really not true with electric, solid-body guitars. The materials play some role, but the down-stream amplification and processing is where the biggest differences occur, combined with the guitar's electronics. Body shape has very little to do with it. Fender basically creates the same-looking guitar at many price points specifically to capitalize on letting everyone buy a "stratocaster". The quality difference is the combined materials, craftsmanship, hardware and electronics.
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. :)
>Anyway Bo Diddley demonstrated the most optimal body shape for holding electronics. :)
This argument wins, fair and square
Guitars are very much about aesthetics, which is why they're so often strategically placed in the background on Zoom calls.
Ergonomics, yes, sure.
For the sound though, a block of any material strong enough to resist the string tension will be just fine.
Well there's also truss rods for when the material isn't strong enough to resist the string tension!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt they could trademark this. Just like Lego, you cannot trademark a functional thing. This is copyright.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.
if you've seen a picture of an electric guitar in the last 75 years you'd know this horse bolted a while ago. The "classic" styles of stratocaster, telecaster, les paul and SG have been made by everybody since forever. And that's before you even establish if Fender has some form of "trademark" (on a shape!)
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This isn’t a trademark case.
Yes. However, they are not suing based on a trademark, they are suing based on having copyright on the shape of the body.
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.
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.
Plus the Chinese firm didn't even show up to defend themselves, so it was a default judgement.
I suspect because the Chinese firm in question was a fabrication of FMIC for exactly this purpose.
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.
There are a lot of real Chinese firms (factories) that make unapproved copies including body shape, headstock shape, logo, and brand name.
There are, making such a conspiracy all the easier to perpetrate.
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.
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.
> Above like $500, they all play pretty much the same
Yeah, really cheap guitars (like $150 cheap) can be great but they also can be terrible due to non existent QC and electronics and hardware being the cheapest available because every cent matters.
But as soon as you hit a price point where QC exists a lot of reasonably priced instruments just need a proper setup and better electronics (not the pickups, but pots, wiring and shielding, the cheapest mods that you can do in a guitar or bass) to feel like a professional instrument that you can use in any situation.
And you are dead on on yamahas, if you play a pacifica you can be sure that almost every single pacifica of the same model will feel very closer, yamaha consistency and QC is amazing at their price point.
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> can be great but they also can be terrible due to non existent QC and electronics and hardware being the cheapest available because every cent matters.
This also perfectly describes the CBS era of Fender (late 1960s to 1970s). There's survivor bias in the ones left, but the prices absolutely do not reflect the quality relative to later ones.
Above a price point their is no objectively ‘better’
I have been playing for 40 years and can tell you I can be mediocre on a fender/squier/gibson
Playing a strat makes you feel like a rockstar. Simple as that
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.
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.
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.
I bought three Harley Benton models across the years. Fender is much better quality!
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Gibson also have some history in this department - the PRS thing got a lot of press at the time
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.
> It's Fender abusing the courts
I think "BigCo abusing the courts" — or alternately, "courts are designed to facilitate abuse by the wealthy" — is the essence of this story.
The case is dicey at best on the legal merits. It also offends community sentiments because it's a rugpull against businesses who wouldn't be copying if the design had been defended from the start.
But none of that matters because Fender can exhaust the resources of the companies it's targeting. All that matters is who can pay their lawyers the longest in a war of attrition.
Rock 'n' Roll has died many deaths. I suppose this is just one more, but it still hurts.
Patents and trademarks would not cover it, but fortunately this case was about copyright.
Trademarks are infinite though. Which makes sense, since otherwise anyone could produce "Coca Cola".
Trademarks only apply if the thing isn't generic. I can legally copy the recipe for coca cola (if I can figure it out) and sell that as 'bluGill cola', but I can't sell it as coca cola even though it would be identical. There is ample evidence that the shape is generic - it has been copied by far too many to claim it isn't generic.
I doubt they can show a properly registered copyright, which would have been required before 1978. I doubt the copyright laws back then would have even allowed copyrighting the shape like that (but I'm not a lawyer). If they can show they registered the copyright correctly under the old laws they would have a copyright case since copyright applies even if they are generic.
Also, since the shape has functional aspects (see others), patents would be the correct protection, but the important patents (if any) have expired long ago. You can still patent something today if you make a variation of the shape - but it would be trivial for anyone to work around that patent since the main design is free of patents and a very specific minor change from the common shape it patentable.
> I doubt they can show a properly registered copyright, which would have been required before 1978. I doubt the copyright laws back then would have even allowed copyrighting the shape like that (but I'm not a lawyer).
None of that matters to Fender's case here, though. They benefit regardless of the outcome in court. If someone fights them and Fender wins, or no one fights them, then they cause an enormous, permanent headache to almost every single one of their competitors. If someone fights them and Fender loses, they cause an enormous, temporary headache to almost every single one of their competitors and otherwise there's no change in the market. The worst case for Fender is the status quo, there's no reason for them not to pursue this.
The only way Fender loses here is if they piss off enough customers to cause a drop in sales. But that seems unlikely to me, even extremely pissed off customers forget about these things pretty quick, as Reddit and Elon Musk's white supremacist social network demonstrated after shitting all over their own users and seeing no terribly significant drop in usage.
Fender loses lawyer costs which will be high if this goes to court. And my prediction is they get sued for legal costs after they lose. Though I reasonable odds a judge will toss this out before trial and so legal costs are not high.
They have to be actively fought for the entire time you own the rights to the trademark though, that doesn't seem to the be the case.
Trademarks are a fundamentally different kind of IP.
With copyright and patent, the creator of the work is being protected. But with trademark law, it's not about protecting the content of the IP as such. It's about protecting the consumer from being misled into thinking they're getting the real thing.
And given the guitar market at large, with about ten thousand different guitars in the general shape of a Strat, it's pretty much universally known that the name on the headstock is what you have to look at to differentiate. So long as that name isn't misleading, I have a hard time imagining how they could make a case of it.
I mean, if the headstock says "Fernando Stratoblaster" or something, then MAYBE it's a little confusing. But my guitar, a Kramer Focus 6000 looked very nearly identical to a Strat (the edges are less beveled, the headstock is pointier, but at a quick glance...), but it quite clearly says that it's NOT a strat. Nobody's going to be fooled despite the striking similarity in shape.
The reason the headstocks are different is because Fender _won_ cases about that in the past.
how is guitar shape a trademark?
edit: thanks for the responses!
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The asymmetric body shape was a very clever design out of necessity, as the long-scale Precision bass needed a longer horn at the top in order to avoid neck dive.
Interestingly, the only trademarked part of the Stratocaster, the neck shape, was copied from a Bigsby model, which is based on a Violin Scroll Shape.
Upvoted because you've captured the overall point pretty well, but I will say that the Flying V can be pretty dang comfortable seated if you hold in the classical position (i.e., resting on your fretting side thigh). I almost always play standing anyway, but when I do sit, I usually rest the guitar (acoustic or electric) on my left leg anyway because I find it more comfortable.
As with most things guitar, it's mostly about what works for the individual player.
This is why the materials from Fender keep trying to emphasize that the strat shape was an explicitly creative decision and not a functional one, because if it's primarily a functional design, they've got nothing (see how there's only so many ways to design a shovel, you can't sue someone for copying your shovel design)
> the Flying V shape is not really playable while seated
it needs to be played in a classical position (with a footrest ideally) but it's more ergonomic than the standard strat position.
It's the same reason why bikes all look the same. There's only so many ways to design around a set of constraints.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The body has literally 0 effect on the sound of an electric guitar. Only the pickups matter.
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.
Well, the pickups and the tensors for the strings
If you only care about the sound, according to a single youtuber.
Other things one might care about:
- Ergonomics: weight, balance, shape of the neck & body, finishes all affect the feel of playing the guitar
- Build quality: Reliability, stability of the wood, ease of setup
- Durability: Quality of finishes, quality of assembly
- Aesthetics
For those outside the guitar world, the above is one side of a debate that has raged for years and will never be resolved. Stating that POV as fact rather than opinion is disingenuous.
Hundreds of famous artists are deeply attached to the sonic attributes of their favorite guitars. Are they wrong?
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.
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!"
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.
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
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.
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.
I think you're both right.
Marketing is very effective, and lots of people are willing to pay a little bit more for a particular brand.
On the other hand there's also lots of people who will look for the best value for the money, or want to support smaller luthiers.
As you mentioned usually with experience one gravitates towards the second group, but most instrument purchases is entry level gear for beginners.
Disclaimer: coming from classical guitar world, but have noticed largely the same pattern, eg someone paying more for an Alhambra when a regional luthier will be less. Not that Alhambra is a bad brand, just that those marketing salaries have to come from somewhere!
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?
I agree with you due to cnc and production being relatively standardized
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.
> they're getting squeezed from the low end, sub-$1K part of the market coming from China and Indonesia.
This was true in the 80s with Japanese competition as well (the last time Fender tried putting the body shapes back in the box) - Tokei and friends were making vastly better guitars than even the American Fender production at that point.
The way Fender survived was by buying the top producers and forming Squier guitars as their entry level.
> It's a shame to see a once-great American brand get cooked by resorting to lawfare instead of QC.
They did this in the past too, largely over the headstock shape. My "main" Stratocaster-type guitars (despite owning several genuine Fenders of different vintages) are a pair of Levinson Blade R4s - one has the Fender-shape headstock and the other has a modified version from after Levinson got sued in the 90s.
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.
> 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.
In the US, I'm pretty sure they have no protection. They lost a US case to establish a trademark in 2009 [1] (2009 article title says copyright, but text is about a trademark suit). A design patent would have expired, unless it was filed in 1954 and was pending until recently or is still pending... US patents filed before 1995 don't start their validity period until issuance, but that'd be a big stretch.
It's possible there's a US copyright claim, but on a 1954 design, you would have to have registered it, marked the works with the copyright (on at least most of the copies), and timely renewed. There's also, IMHO, a solid question of if US copyright applies to the shape of a guitar. If they had a strong case, I think they would have tried to enforce on it in 2009 when they tried to enforce on trademark.
[1] https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/fender-loses-guitar-...
There’s a story, possibly apocryphal, that the first electric guitar demo was a bunch of strings nailed to some basic lumber and it received a negative reception. The designer went home, tore apart his acoustic guitar and mounted the electronics inside. The sound was not changed by this. The critical reception however was much improved. And the rest is history.
The shape might not be purely functional—and that seems to be the basis for their attempted lawsuit.
It’s a true story, and it’s about Les Paul and “the log.”
https://guitar.com/features/opinion-analysis/how-les-pauls-l...
The "log" (generally dated to 1941) is the railroad sleeper ("tie" for Americans?) with wings made in the Epiphone factory in Manhattan attached to the side, and is in the Country Music Hall of Fame in Nashville. This is the guitar that Gibson turned down until Fender and Bigsby (via Merle Travis) popularized the solid body guitar.
The predecessor was a single string on a piece of actual rail and two spikes, amplified by a telephone receiver in the mid-late 1920s.
well, in the US, those shapes were ruled public domain.
in Germany, Fender recently won a default ruling because a chinese counterfeiter didn't even show up in court, and they're now using that to go after anyone selling in the EU, even though that's not really what that case win means. But private equity is going to private equity.
Fender does this with their headstock design for replacement necks only. However they forbid license-holding manufacturers from both selling a complete guitar with a Fender headstock shape and even showing the guitar neck on a finished guitar during the sale process.
They'd have to do something more complex like licensing the shape + name at the same time, since they do own "Stratocaster". Not sure how big of a demand there is for the name though, or if Fender was even interested in licensing that part.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.)
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.
> 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.
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.
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 (!!!).
This is really not true with electric, solid-body guitars. The materials play some role, but the down-stream amplification and processing is where the biggest differences occur, combined with the guitar's electronics. Body shape has very little to do with it. Fender basically creates the same-looking guitar at many price points specifically to capitalize on letting everyone buy a "stratocaster". The quality difference is the combined materials, craftsmanship, hardware and electronics.
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. :)
>Anyway Bo Diddley demonstrated the most optimal body shape for holding electronics. :)
This argument wins, fair and square
Guitars are very much about aesthetics, which is why they're so often strategically placed in the background on Zoom calls.
Ergonomics, yes, sure.
For the sound though, a block of any material strong enough to resist the string tension will be just fine.
Well there's also truss rods for when the material isn't strong enough to resist the string tension!
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
I doubt they could trademark this. Just like Lego, you cannot trademark a functional thing. This is copyright.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
>> otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.
if you've seen a picture of an electric guitar in the last 75 years you'd know this horse bolted a while ago. The "classic" styles of stratocaster, telecaster, les paul and SG have been made by everybody since forever. And that's before you even establish if Fender has some form of "trademark" (on a shape!)
This isn’t a trademark case.
Yes. However, they are not suing based on a trademark, they are suing based on having copyright on the shape of the body.
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.
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.
I suspect because the Chinese firm in question was a fabrication of FMIC for exactly this purpose.
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
There are a lot of real Chinese firms (factories) that make unapproved copies including body shape, headstock shape, logo, and brand name.
There are, making such a conspiracy all the easier to perpetrate.
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.
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.
> Above like $500, they all play pretty much the same
Yeah, really cheap guitars (like $150 cheap) can be great but they also can be terrible due to non existent QC and electronics and hardware being the cheapest available because every cent matters.
But as soon as you hit a price point where QC exists a lot of reasonably priced instruments just need a proper setup and better electronics (not the pickups, but pots, wiring and shielding, the cheapest mods that you can do in a guitar or bass) to feel like a professional instrument that you can use in any situation.
And you are dead on on yamahas, if you play a pacifica you can be sure that almost every single pacifica of the same model will feel very closer, yamaha consistency and QC is amazing at their price point.
> can be great but they also can be terrible due to non existent QC and electronics and hardware being the cheapest available because every cent matters.
This also perfectly describes the CBS era of Fender (late 1960s to 1970s). There's survivor bias in the ones left, but the prices absolutely do not reflect the quality relative to later ones.
Above a price point their is no objectively ‘better’
I have been playing for 40 years and can tell you I can be mediocre on a fender/squier/gibson
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.
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
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.
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.
> It's Fender abusing the courts
I think "BigCo abusing the courts" — or alternately, "courts are designed to facilitate abuse by the wealthy" — is the essence of this story.
The case is dicey at best on the legal merits. It also offends community sentiments because it's a rugpull against businesses who wouldn't be copying if the design had been defended from the start.
But none of that matters because Fender can exhaust the resources of the companies it's targeting. All that matters is who can pay their lawyers the longest in a war of attrition.
Rock 'n' Roll has died many deaths. I suppose this is just one more, but it still hurts.
Patents and trademarks would not cover it, but fortunately this case was about copyright.
Trademarks are infinite though. Which makes sense, since otherwise anyone could produce "Coca Cola".
Trademarks only apply if the thing isn't generic. I can legally copy the recipe for coca cola (if I can figure it out) and sell that as 'bluGill cola', but I can't sell it as coca cola even though it would be identical. There is ample evidence that the shape is generic - it has been copied by far too many to claim it isn't generic.
I doubt they can show a properly registered copyright, which would have been required before 1978. I doubt the copyright laws back then would have even allowed copyrighting the shape like that (but I'm not a lawyer). If they can show they registered the copyright correctly under the old laws they would have a copyright case since copyright applies even if they are generic.
Also, since the shape has functional aspects (see others), patents would be the correct protection, but the important patents (if any) have expired long ago. You can still patent something today if you make a variation of the shape - but it would be trivial for anyone to work around that patent since the main design is free of patents and a very specific minor change from the common shape it patentable.
> I doubt they can show a properly registered copyright, which would have been required before 1978. I doubt the copyright laws back then would have even allowed copyrighting the shape like that (but I'm not a lawyer).
None of that matters to Fender's case here, though. They benefit regardless of the outcome in court. If someone fights them and Fender wins, or no one fights them, then they cause an enormous, permanent headache to almost every single one of their competitors. If someone fights them and Fender loses, they cause an enormous, temporary headache to almost every single one of their competitors and otherwise there's no change in the market. The worst case for Fender is the status quo, there's no reason for them not to pursue this.
The only way Fender loses here is if they piss off enough customers to cause a drop in sales. But that seems unlikely to me, even extremely pissed off customers forget about these things pretty quick, as Reddit and Elon Musk's white supremacist social network demonstrated after shitting all over their own users and seeing no terribly significant drop in usage.
Fender loses lawyer costs which will be high if this goes to court. And my prediction is they get sued for legal costs after they lose. Though I reasonable odds a judge will toss this out before trial and so legal costs are not high.
They have to be actively fought for the entire time you own the rights to the trademark though, that doesn't seem to the be the case.
Trademarks are a fundamentally different kind of IP.
With copyright and patent, the creator of the work is being protected. But with trademark law, it's not about protecting the content of the IP as such. It's about protecting the consumer from being misled into thinking they're getting the real thing.
And given the guitar market at large, with about ten thousand different guitars in the general shape of a Strat, it's pretty much universally known that the name on the headstock is what you have to look at to differentiate. So long as that name isn't misleading, I have a hard time imagining how they could make a case of it.
I mean, if the headstock says "Fernando Stratoblaster" or something, then MAYBE it's a little confusing. But my guitar, a Kramer Focus 6000 looked very nearly identical to a Strat (the edges are less beveled, the headstock is pointier, but at a quick glance...), but it quite clearly says that it's NOT a strat. Nobody's going to be fooled despite the striking similarity in shape.
The reason the headstocks are different is because Fender _won_ cases about that in the past.
how is guitar shape a trademark?
edit: thanks for the responses!
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Indeed. The lineage is pretty clear:
Spanish Guitar -> Dreadnoughts with Cutaway -> Flat Solid-body Telecaster -> Flat Precision/Telecaster Bass -> Contoured Stratocaster
The asymmetric body shape was a very clever design out of necessity, as the long-scale Precision bass needed a longer horn at the top in order to avoid neck dive.
Interestingly, the only trademarked part of the Stratocaster, the neck shape, was copied from a Bigsby model, which is based on a Violin Scroll Shape.
Upvoted because you've captured the overall point pretty well, but I will say that the Flying V can be pretty dang comfortable seated if you hold in the classical position (i.e., resting on your fretting side thigh). I almost always play standing anyway, but when I do sit, I usually rest the guitar (acoustic or electric) on my left leg anyway because I find it more comfortable.
As with most things guitar, it's mostly about what works for the individual player.
This is why the materials from Fender keep trying to emphasize that the strat shape was an explicitly creative decision and not a functional one, because if it's primarily a functional design, they've got nothing (see how there's only so many ways to design a shovel, you can't sue someone for copying your shovel design)
> the Flying V shape is not really playable while seated
it needs to be played in a classical position (with a footrest ideally) but it's more ergonomic than the standard strat position.
It's the same reason why bikes all look the same. There's only so many ways to design around a set of constraints.
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
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.
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...
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.
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.
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.
The body has literally 0 effect on the sound of an electric guitar. Only the pickups matter.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
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.
Well, the pickups and the tensors for the strings
If you only care about the sound, according to a single youtuber.
Other things one might care about:
- Ergonomics: weight, balance, shape of the neck & body, finishes all affect the feel of playing the guitar
- Build quality: Reliability, stability of the wood, ease of setup
- Durability: Quality of finishes, quality of assembly
- Aesthetics
For those outside the guitar world, the above is one side of a debate that has raged for years and will never be resolved. Stating that POV as fact rather than opinion is disingenuous.
Hundreds of famous artists are deeply attached to the sonic attributes of their favorite guitars. Are they wrong?
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.
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.
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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