Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

I agree with you due to cnc and production being relatively standardized

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.

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?

> 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

> 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.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

Yes. However, they are not suing based on a trademark, they are suing based on having copyright on the shape of the body.

This isn’t a trademark case.

>> 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!)

I suspect because the Chinese firm in question was a fabrication of FMIC for exactly this purpose.

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 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

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.

how is guitar shape a trademark?

edit: thanks for the responses!

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 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.

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.

> 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.

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.

It's the same reason why bikes all look the same. There's only so many ways to design around a set of constraints.

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...

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.

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.

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?

Well, the pickups and the tensors for the strings

At least in Europe, The Shadows were HUGE in the late 50s and early 60s. Like Beatles levels huge. In many European countries Fender weren't sold / distributed until the early-to-mid 60s, so genuine Fenders were rare and expensive - often sold second-hand from someone who bought them in the US (merchant sailors for example). It is said that Hank Marvin was the first strat-player in Europe.

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.