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.
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.
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 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.
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.
Small builders like LsL have the community’s sympathy. They don’t have the resources to fight a legal battle against the world’s largest guitar company.
I was just thinking about this: Would it kill guitar makers to stop copying the Strat and [P|J] bass? It is wild that the earliest guitar designs are still ubiquitous / the most popular types. For anyone not familiar: The matter is not about iterating on these original designs; there's lots of that too, including by the same companies! It's about instruments that are effectively clones, and look (at a glance) identical other than the name on the headstock. Sometimes they are fancy ones built to a higher quality than the original, but superficially look like clones.
It is also interesting that MusicMan (Another Fender company!) has gone differently; still some of the most recognizable designs, but they have been selling officially licensed versions instead to capture the lower end. (SUB, OLP, Sterling etc), and don't have the copycats of the Fender models.
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.
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...
So they used China scare as a trojan horse to sue other US manufacturers? There's some delicious irony in that.
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.
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”.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/williamhochberg/2022/09/20/gibs...
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?
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.
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.
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.
Similarly, "T-type" and "T-style" is used to refer to guitars similar to Fender's Telecaster guitars.
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.
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.
You should upvote my comment. I'm marssaxman2, which is 2 better than 1! I make better comments
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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.
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!
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.
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.
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-...
The shape might not be purely functional—and that seems to be the basis for their attempted lawsuit.
https://guitar.com/features/opinion-analysis/how-les-pauls-l...
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.
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.
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.
Guitars are not about aesthetics, otherwise Fender wouldn't have marques like Squier or ranges like Highway One to differentiate their low-quality tiers.
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.
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.
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.
A barely related ruling in the EU which has very different copyright and trademark law is being used as the basis for this suit.
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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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.
Yamaha makes fantastic stuff, they're a great choice.
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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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.
I have been playing for 40 years and can tell you I can be mediocre on a fender/squier/gibson
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.
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.
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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.
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.
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.
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.
edit: thanks for the responses!
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.
As with most things guitar, it's mostly about what works for the individual player.
it needs to be played in a classical position (with a footrest ideally) but it's more ergonomic than the standard strat position.
Being a serial patent/trademark troll is the private equity company's bread and butter.
Alright, my Trogdor-shaped guitar might happen after all...
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.
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.
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
Hundreds of famous artists are deeply attached to the sonic attributes of their favorite guitars. Are they wrong?
So back then the Stratocaster was synonymous with Hank Marvin, and many stores here even advertised Strats as "The Shadows guitars" as a marketing gimmick when they started selling them (I've searched through old news papers in looking for old Fender/Gibson advertisements).
Hank Marvin was also the leading reason for Fiesta Red being such a popular color here. Many stores selling distributing Fender offered the custom colors (Sunburst was the standard color) where they'd repaint your Strat in red.
Then Beatless came, along with the other big bands (Stones, etc.) and artists (Hendrix), which made guitar music very common and popular.
These vintage designs are all about nostalgia and looks.
Anyway Bo Diddley demonstrated the most optimal body shape for holding electronics. :)
This argument wins, fair and square
For the sound though, a block of any material strong enough to resist the string tension will be just fine.
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 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.
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