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.
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.
For the sound though, a block of any material strong enough to resist the string tension will be just fine.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.