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Comment by scrumper | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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!)

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