> In 1985, Bill Schultz and a group of investors—including company employees and external companies like Servco Pacific Capitol—purchased Fender from CBS for $12.5 million and renamed it "Fender Musical Instruments Corporation" (FMIC).
> Ownership changed in December 2001, when private equity firm Weston Presidio bought a controlling stake in Fender for $57.8 million.
> Longtime investor Servco instead bought out Weston Presidio, with TPG Growth as an equal partner.
> In 2020, Servco bought out TPG Growth's stake, making them Fender's majority owner.
A long history of private equity ownership. I'm not sure CBS owning them would be much better, which started in 1965.
As much as I like to blame private equity for the downfall of once great companies, I'm not sure how to feel about this one, as they've been investor owned and passed around for decades.
IIRC pre-GFC FMIC has a generally good reputation among guitarists, and certainly in comparison to the preceding era of Fender, when it was owned by CBS.
This is true but the buyout happened in 1985. Servco Pacific has been in charge for longer than Leo Fender and CBS, the two previous owners, put together.
My ex and her bf have been doing this thing where they match any word. For example, "Cardio? I hardly startio." You can do this too now. You’re welcome.
(It’s surprisingly hard to think of a motivating example.)
Makes complete sense to me. Fender has immense cultural cachet among multiple big-spending demographics: blues boomers, Cobain disciples, indie kids, even the hair metal guys via Charvel. The Gibson/Harley-Davidson move of leveraging a company that makes stuff into a lifestyle brand is the play here. Fender would rather throw legal weight around to execute that than compete by building high-quality guitars at a good price.
Too many Clapton lawyers have gotten hip to boutique builders. Fender would rather make them buy a $5000 Masterbuilt Custom Shop Deluxe Roadworn Heritage Double Relic No-Caster than a Tom Anderson or Suhr. Same for kids buying Harley Bentons and ESPs - a $1000 Indonesian-built instrument is their future if Fender has anything to say about it.
> Fender would rather throw legal weight around to execute that than compete by building high-quality guitars at a good price.
The thing is, they already do that, or have in the relatively recent past. Arguably, they invented that move in the 1980s when they started selling non USA/Japanese models as Squier models.
There's only so much that brings them, though, and guitar music ain't what it used to be. The pie isn't growing very much (maybe at all) and now there's competition trying to capture more of the market.
Would Bill Schultz have done the same thing if the 80s and 90s hadn't been so good to rock music? Hard to say, but if the alternative was "No more Fender", maybe.
The real change is that the private equity owners also recently bought reverb.com, and must've seen the numbers showing that people aren't buying as many new fenders as they are other brands, and because the only thing they know how to do is extract money from people by destroying rather than creating, they went down this super obvious PE playbook
I still think this whole Fender-suing-everyone thing will end up with Thomann owning them either partially or completely.
But the weird German lawsuit was always about the fact that some private equity suits (or bad Hawaiian shirts, it seems) are upset that Thomann (and others) sell the PRS Silver Sky, which as they have probably deduced from the reverb.com data they now own, likely outsells equivalent Fender models by some margin.
So I think Thomann are just bringing it on.
And they aren't the only ones: LSL hired the lawyer who won the judgement that put the S-type body shape in the public domain in 2009.
German lawsuits are far less expensive than … what we learn from huge american lawsuits in tv. Unlikely that Thomann will make piles of money. It‘s more about the right to keep selling those guitars and quite some marketing impact.
The new CEO of Fender is from the luxury goods world.
Each Silver Sky model (SE or non) outsells the equivalent Stratocaster model, from what I understand, by a noticeable margin, which Servco will now know with clarity, because they have sales data from reverb (which they acquired one month before they took out this lawsuit).
It is a naïve take, but have a look at what Fender's CEO looks like, how he dresses and carries himself, and tell me that a big part of this isn't injured pride that John Mayer went to PRS.
I think if this was really about the cheap body guitars — a nearly zero-margin market for decades — they wouldn't have sent a C&D to LsL or PRS, because that was always going to invite trouble.
Harley Benton is a problem at some small level and I am sure Fender will suggest it is, but Fender have had a "buy the real thing" type of marketing campaign for both Fender and Squier since the 90s at least.
The 2009 lawsuit made this clear; it detailed all Fender's "buy original" marketing campaigns as a way of pointing out that Fender has never policed the right to make the S-type body shape.
Squier competes pretty adequately with Harley Benton and all the other cheap brands; at that price, being "Fender's budget brand" has prudence associated with it.
What has changed is that Fender are losing out at the top end to high-end luthiers who give a shit, and PRS. And now they know exactly how badly. This lawsuit will feature a lot of data from reverb.com, I suspect.
Harley Benton is "extremly popular"? I don't think so and the upper price ceiling for HB seems to be at ~400-500 USD right now. Decent hardware for anyone just starting out with their first instrument, sure, but i never heard of anyone buying a HB as a second or third guitar.
I used to work for a Thomann competitor "Musicstore" in ~2005.
The server was some tower server in a back office with a note reminding everyone not to turn it off.
With Thoman being hugged to death right now I would like to think of there being a similar situation (its probably fine, but it made me feel nostalgic).
Similar work experience, I was with a CBS-owned music company that had a CNC machine with some old Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster body templates.
The hardware manager was cool and would let employees turn slabs of wood into Tele- and Strat-style bodies after hours.
When the Fender/German court ruling came down, my first thought was: Fender has had roughly 70 years with the Stratocaster design, and the broader industry has been making S-style guitars for decades.
Surely at some point a body shape becomes generic, right?
Leo Fender patented the Strat design, the body became public domain when the patent expired in I think 1965. More recently a US court ruled that only the headstock design of a guitar remains intellectual property, because there's really only so many ways to design the body of a guitar
I think you're thinking of trademark, but this isn't a trademark claim, it's a copyright infringement claim. The legal question is whether the guitar shape can be copyrighted.
It would be odd to try this as copyrightable in the U.S, where there’s a pretty clear distinction between art added to a guitar, like PRS bird inlays, and the core body shape.
That's why they aren't trying this in the US (yet), where the bodies were explicitly declared public domain. They're trying to turn a default judgement into something bigger in the EU.
You would think this would have been quite an easy win, because regardless of who makes guitars with S-type bodies, the outline of the Stratocaster or Telecaster is surely sufficiently identifiable with Fender as to be something they could at least claim should be their trademark in certain categories (on merchandise etc.)
Fender failed to prove that if people saw a line art outline of the Stratocaster, they would associate it first with "Fender". And indeed an illustrated dictionary at the time used such an outline to just generically illustrate "Electric guitar", apparently.
And in that finding:
Finally, there is no evidence of record that from the
first production of the guitars incorporating these shapes
in the early 1950s until 2003, that applicant or its
predecessors in interest ever treated the outlines of the
body shapes as trademarks. In fact, we may infer from the
evidence of record that applicant and its predecessors
themselves did not view them as trademarks. They never
policed the body shape, only the word marks and headstock
profiles. In addition, they never claimed trademark rights
in the body outlines publicly through, for example, the
catalogues, until 2004. Rather, they only claimed the word
marks and the headstock profiles. In the meantime, many
other guitar manufacturers sold guitars with the identical
body shapes for at least 30 years, either as complete
guitars or in the form of kits.
This was in 2009, when it was clear that Fender had never "policed" the body shape until that point.
And this — from a deposition from Warmoth as far as I can determine (they made spare parts) which makes it clear that Fender never entered into an agreement with Warmouth about the body shape, only the neck (because of the headstock shape which they believed was trademarked):
Q. And you have a licensing agreement to
manufacture what from Fender?
A. Replacement necks utilizing the Fender
trademark head shape.
Q. In those discussions utilizing that license,
was there any conversation or written
documentation with reference to body shapes?
A. No.
Q. Would your company be harmed if you’re no
longer able to make body shapes depicted in [126,
928 and 127]?
A. It would have a significant impact on our
sales numbers and value [sic] of employees.
Q. Why are you an opposer in this proceeding?
A. I’ve been making these body shapes for 30
years, unopposed, untrademarked, and have built a
business on making these parts. There’s a lot of
demand for it. While I make other body shapes,
the demand for them is pretty insignificant when
compared to these three shapes.
So this is Warmoth, in 2009, saying that Fender never asked them to license the body shape as far back as 1979 (which is also, if I remember reading correctly, when Schecter and G&L started making S-type guitars)
So even if they do have ownership of some kind of copyright, they've never asserted it before and three decades of their own conduct kind of militates against them being able to enforce it.
And they aren't the only ones, the finding goes on because Fender took action against multiple companies (this is around page 30–40 or so).
I always read around here how european server companies are incompetent so there is no european infrastructure so european companies have to host everything on AWS. But this biggest european music store apparently powers their huge store from some server in the back office?
This is a place where European copyright law is significantly different from US copyright law. In the US, copyright cannot cover a "functional part", which is why there is a third party auto parts industry. Improved functionality can be covered by a utility patent, but that lasts only 20 years.
Designs can be protected by design patents, which last only 15 years.
So in the US, any rights left in the form of the Stratocaster expired long ago.
US companies sometimes try to make "trade dress" or trademark claims, but that's much weaker than copyright.
Fender has protected the strat design under the claim of "work of applied art" (https://spotlight.fender.com/newsroom/news/1004) which is also a concept in US copyright law, they just don't have a judgement for it etc. in their favour, unlike in Europe.
That article, and LLMs, seem to pick up on an article from US Legal Forms.[1] That article itself reads like something written by an LLM.
A more serious review of the works of applied art problem comes from the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts.[2] That article ends with "Thus, the 'separability' line Congress has drawn, albeit often difficult to discern coherently, places most overall designs of useful articles in the public domain." Separability means being able to take the decorative design off the useful object. This covers logos on T-shirts, for example. A T-shirt with no logo still works as a T-shirt. But if you can't take the decorative part off the functional object, it's not separable. The common squiggle-shaped bicycle rack is an excellent example. That won design awards and is admired, but it's not copyrightable - you can't take the squiggle off the bike rack and still have the bike rack.[3]
The Fender Stratocaster hits that limit - take away the Strat form, and there's no guitar there.
I can't find the details, but this needs to be under the copyright laws of the 1950s, which were very different from today. If they didn't properly register and re-register the copyright over the years the copyright is public domain. A lawyer will need to figure out these details of course.
Edit: of course this case is in Germany, so US law doesn't apply and I claim not information on what their laws are.
European copyright law has broader coverage than US law. Europe recognizes "sweat of the brow" copyright. Some databases are copyrightable in the EU even though there was no human creativity involved. The US does not do that, because the copyright clause in the Constitution limits the reach of intellectual property law. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone (phone directories not copyrightable), Bridgeman vs. Corel (copies of public domain content not copyrightable), and Meshwerks vs. Toyota (3D scans of real world objects not copyrightable). The way new cases are going, AI-created content mostly isn't copyrightable, either.
FMIC likely cannot even properly identify the allegedly protected shape of the Strat because they sell multiple Stratocasters that have different body shapes and proportions. They may simply not be able to say "it's this thick", even, because they sell Strats with different thicknesses. They might not be able to say "it has these body contours" because they sell flat, edge-bound Stratocasters. The list goes on.
Plus, FMIC may not even be able to prove that they legally own any rights that do exist! It's not at all clear they acquired the long-lived rights from Leo Fender when he sold to CBS; they only secured a ten year agreement not to compete, and the design patent they had on some aspects of the body shape would have expired in 1969 or 1970.
The body shape is in the public domain in the USA; it has been for 17 years.
Part of me thinks that they are insane and part of me thinks they want to be acquired because they have debts.
This is exactly the argument that the lawyer for LSL guitars is making - who happens to be the same lawyer that beat Fender back in 2009 on behalf of the USPTO and cost them the copyright in the US :)
FWIW I think if it is true they also sent a letter to Ibanez — presumably about the AZES, which is the only thing really close — then that is where it gets interesting.
Because the AZES is clearly a double-cutaway S-type guitar shape, but it is just different enough to spot. And that then raises the question of whether Fender's own variations are as noticeable, because one of theirs has an AZES-type top cutaway.
This is when the penny dropped for me on that first point — when I read last week they had sent a letter to Ibanez.
Fender's weird CEO did say it's "not about all double cutaway" guitars. But if it is about a PRS and it is about an Ibanez, they are going to have to get somewhat specific about what they are claiming.
ETA: I reckon Fender will fold, because I think the second point is entirely possible. If CBS could have stopped Leo Fender selling S- and T-type body shapes entirely on the basis of what they owned, why did they only secure what amounts to a non-compete agreement?
The big risk for FMIC is in discovery on this point, I reckon. It will do a lot of harm to their reputation if it turns out they have been properly advised they have no claim and they've gone ahead anyway.
Maybe the law should protect creative part of the shape (that doesn't affect the sound)? I do not know but I think that designing a good instrument is not easy and it is not cool that someone can just copy it without doing any work.
That is effectively what Fender are claiming they now have in Europe (off the back of a case that was not even argued because the vendor didn't turn up).
One key thing here is that the Stratocaster did have a design patent attached, and when your design patent expires, that's it; none of that is protected.
But the guitar was designed in 1954 (and indeed the body shape in 1951, fundamentally, because the Fender Precision bass guitar looked like that first). So the design patent was gone by 1970.
At the time, US copyright did not apply to functional shapes, and most of the core aspects of the Strat shape are actually functional — cutaways and sculpting.
Manufacturers like Schecter were making guitars with an S body shape by 1979. So this isn't new, and it is weird.
It influences playability, which is functionality. Fender's marketing advertised the shape as a functional feature: body carve for easier playing standing up, double cut for easier access to higher frets
Ergonomics. Any solid-body guitar that's designed to be comfortable when played sitting or standing will converge on a strat-ish body shape. You can make a computer mouse in any shape, but the shape of a comfortable mouse is constrained by the shape of an average human palm.
The various curves and bevels on the Stratocaster aren't arbitrary aesthetic features, they're affordances to fit the human body. Change them too much and you get a guitar that won't balance on your knee or that pokes you in the ribs or that limits your access to the high frets.
Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible. His design is both radical and basically derivative of the Strat, because Leo Fender happened to find something close to the perfect solution in 1954.
But, for example, are those horns (?) necessary for ergonomics? Do the potentiometers and output jack have to be positioned like that? Does the pickguard has to be the same shape? I do not think so. Les Pauls have different shape and are pretty popular too.
> Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible
It looks somewhat ... not how you expect the guitar to look.
> But, for example, are those horns (?) necessary for ergonomics?
More or less, yes.
If you "fill" the cutways on a Strat you have a typical guitar shape.
You want the upper horn there or somewhere near it because the upper strap lug needs to be about there for balance, but some players (especially those with bigger hands) will want their thumb to be free from being blocked by the top of the guitar while they are playing the higher frets, so there's a cutaway. You then want the lower horn to have some of the classic shape below it if you want the guitar to be playable sitting down.
The slope across the top corner of the Strat beyond the bridge is there so that players (in particular guitarists who wear their guitars a bit higher with the fretboard pointing more upwards) don't have the upper arm of their right hand leaning uncomfortably across the edge of the guitar.
Some of these elements were protected by Leo Fender's original design patent, I think, but I can't remember which.
There's an article related to the headline linked at the top which explains it.
"The upper horn ensures perfect balance, the cutaways make it easier to play in the upper registers, and the contours of the body increase playing comfort. The shape of the Stratocaster was created to provide musicians with the most functional and ergonomic tool possible.
This is exactly why it has been taken up, developed further and reinterpreted by luthiers all over the world over decades."
To be fair there is nothing in the shape that makes it sound better than other guitars; so it is not like those modem chip makers or video codec developers that patent the only optimal way to achieve the goal and prevent anybody from competing. Fender does not prevent anyone from making a better guitar. So I do not like copying. It would be better if everyone used their own unique shape rather than something from 50s.
The argument has nothing to do with the sound. A strat style guitar is characterized by:
- Flat top
- Solid body, typically softer/lighter woods
- Bolt-on neck (as opposed to set or through-body)
- Double cutout (as opposed to single/no cutout, V, or other irregular shaped necks) with a longer cutout on top compared to the bottom
- Carved cavity in the top of the body
- "Loaded" pickguard (electronics mounted to it, instead of the body)
- Straight jack mounted into the pickguard
- "Tummy tuck" carved in the back
- Fat/flat shaped bottom of the body like a tele, as opposed to rounded like an LP.
All of these are functional properties of the guitar that have tradeoffs and benefits compared to other designs.
You can have two strats sound completely different but look identical to the untrained eye and the reason for preferring the style has a lot to do with the weight of the instrument and how that weight is distributed when playing standing, and how the body fits in your hands/arms and against your body. There's an argument to be made that the strat is near optimal for comfort in playing.
If you look at competing designs that (PRS McCarty, Ibanez, Schecter, Gretsch - basically anyone) the specific curves may be different but they all look like a Strat because it's genuinely hard to design a different body that feels the same.
The St Vincent signature is one style that I think needs to get more popular but it's not for everyone.
Kramer has been selling strat clones for 40+ years and a big reason they got popular in the 80s was because they were building guitars Fender wouldn't - they just had the same/similar body shape.
Also that first example is a Fender, afaict. Fender has been making cheap strats and teles in China for years. They used to do it exclusively under the Squire brand name but that changed about a decade ago.
OTH people who want to buy strat would prefer to buy "strat with all inherited problems already fixed", be it PRS silver sky, or any boutique brand like LSL / Sandberg / Suhr / Tom Anderson.
I don't play electric guitar (fretted, anyway) at the moment, and I think John Mayer is very beige, but the Silver Sky SE is a really good guitar. They fixed a lot of stuff, and the lower cutaway is really nicely done.
I don't think that's true at all. A strat ("strat style" or "s-style") is a shape and configuration. Many of the non-Fender strats are perfectly fine guitars (I have one) from major manufacturers like Ibanez, ESR, Jackson, and others. See forex: https://www.sweetwater.com/c589--S_style--Electric_Guitars
Those mostly do not look like copies; they have slightly different shape, the jack is located in a different place, Ibanez has shaper horns, the pickups are different, many do not have a pickguard. However, PRS Silver Sky looks somewhat close to the original to me, although it has a different headstock.
What I meant by "copy" is when it looks exactly the same.
The Silver Sky also has a scalloped lower cutaway.
Fender will have a difficult time claiming much in the way of the design of the pickups or pickguard, or the tremelo bridge, because some of that was in the original design patent anyway, and that is long expired.
Plus, for example, the two-pivot trem bridge design they use now that has been copied is not the same as in the patent; they actually copied this innovation themselves. And they use different tuners I think.
Much of this stuff has been litigated already in 2009. And again, a really important point is that back in 2009 they could not prove they had chain of title to even make any claim of copyright, even if such a claim were possible.
FMIC could not or would not demonstrate that they had ownership (and there is really good, very obvious evidence in the market that CBS could not prove that in 1969 either)
So if the Thomann case goes to court in Europe they will have to prove they do, and if it gets into a discovery process the court might hear that Fender have been advised that they definitely do not, and that would be devastating, because that would cast the letters they have been sending in a very different light.
I'm looking at buying one now and as far as I can tell Fender seems to make shoddy quality instruments these days. I see a lot of recommendations for PRS and others.
Fender makes a whole series of Strats at different price points. The challenge is even at the high end Fender has inconsistent QA, so the 'knockoffs' are sometimes way better quality/consistency. See this video for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU7RUpkXsV0
A lot of guitar quality signals will not show through easily in the sound. Like how easy or difficult it is to fret the strings, how well it stays in tune in a controlled environment over time, fit and finish work, etc. That kind of stuff makes the difference between a guitar that can be played, and a guitar which is fun to play.
Almost all of the variation between sufficiently similar electric guitars, barring the quality of the pickups and maybe some of the electronics, can be eliminated in the setup.
And a lot of the expensive luxury stuff people are convinced has an impact on the sound has approximately zero impact on the sound.
sound doesn't really tell you about quality issues, quality issue are more does it have any fret ends that cut into your fingers as you move up and down the neck, are any of the frets too high and causing buzzing, does it maintain its pitch or do you frequently need to re-tune it, is it well setup from the factory, are the strings too high, things like that.
Making two guitars sound similar, especially if the goal was that these guitars should sound similar, isn't all that hard. But also just because they're both the same style of guitar, doesn't mean the goal was for them to sound the same. Even just looking at Fender's line up, different strats have different pickups which are designed to sound different
A lot of it is also the history associated with all the strat cats from the 1950s onwards and really good marketing by fender, you're buying a real strat because you want to be in that company (Buddy Holly to Gilmour etc). I recall only wanting a strat when i was in my wannabe-yngwie phase. nothing else would fit.
In particular the cultural impact of the S-shape guitar has been enhanced by people playing non-Fender S-shapes.
Think Eddie van Halen on his Frankenstrat which has it's own Wikipedia entry and has been displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was probably a Charvel body.
That goes to the heart of the "work of applied art" argument.
Still works... it's not showing as using a CDN, in fact they seem to own their IPv4 space (212.204.75.161) and getting connectivity from a midsize Bavarian ISP (M-net). Maybe there's a routing problem somewhere. The path for me is <my ISP> - DE-CIX - their ISP.
The problem is that after their original patent expired, they sat on their hands for too long. By the time they tried to trademark in 2008/2009, their bodies were considered generic in the US. Gibson, on the other hand, did what Fender should have done and applied for trademark (for their Les Paul body) back in the late 80s.
Now other brands are eating their lunch, and Fender is seemingly trying a last hail marry to get this settled. My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts.
"My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts."
That's exactly what they have done, they sued a Chinese company that was making knock-off Strat copies and selling them in Germany. Fender sued them, the Chinese company was a no show and Fender took that as a win to go after PRS who is selling a John Mayer Strat style guitar.
On a side note, think how conservative music world is, if people are still manufacturing and successfully sell guitar designed in 50s. You can probably take a 50s guitar and connect to a modern amp, or take a modern guitar and connect to a 50s amp and it will work.
Compare this, for example, to smartphone chargers or headphones and their compatibility.
Smartphone chargers had legitimate reason to change. Higher power, faster data, and we learned the hard way that micro usb and all the proprietary connectors before it were fundamentally physically flawed.
Audio hasn't changed at all in the last two centuries. An analog audio signal is fundamental physics and there's nothing to gain or change or improve in any meaningful sense. TRS/phono jacks likewise are just so brute force stupid and rugged that there was never a reason to change.
The connectors and interfaces never changed because the underlying signals never changed because there's nothing to change. Digial electronics on the other hand legitimately have gone through real and worthwhile changes, and been radically redefined many times in the last 60 years.
This is completely true, and there's a good reason.
Almost everything anyone has tried to do to modernize electric guitars in a non-compatible way has had big downsides.
Almost any guitar with a pre-amp or whatever built into it that would allow it to use a cable like an XLR cable ends up needing batteries in the guitar, which then introduce a maintenance/failure point. And very often efforts to introduce this stuff haven't sounded great.
The only place this has kind of changed is super high gain guitars for metal. They are more likely to use active pickups, they'll have a battery, but they still use standard cabling for compatibility.
Anything that is modernized ends up being more expensive and harder to work on yourself. A basic guitar like a Strat or Tele has incredibly simple electronics and is super easy for any guitar player to learn to fix themselves, and most of the parts inside are super cheap. And it all just works really well.
And the audience never cares, they care about the notes you choose to play and the message the musician cares to get across.
As an amusing aside, Stradivarius could not have known how his fiddles would sound today. Most of them have been modernized, with new necks and bass bar, and some other tweaks. Most are played with metal or synthetic strings, and modern bows.
If signals were based on low impedance current loops as opposed to voltage-based like they are today, interference could be much reduced. This would break phantom power, so power to preamps would have to be send through another set of conductors, which would make the design of the electronics easier as well as safer.
I do find it hilarious that the phono jack appeared fully formed and hasn't changed in a hundred years. We got the smaller flavors of TRS sure, but the big honking quarter inch phono jack has stayed exactly the same. Perfect design in one go, no notes.
Even if you think Fender is solely responsible for the design, which is frankly ridiculous, the bloody thing's been around forever and now they're suing?
Having a court stop actual counterfeits -- sure, nobody has a problem with that. That's not what this is.
Then there was the headstock thing, Fender was notorious for pursuing makers of guitars with headstocks that had any resemblance to the Strat headstock. Let's ignore how limited the design space is considering the constraints of six strings - six tuners at the end of a narrow strip of timber. Fender was obviously acting in an anti-competitive way at that point. At the same time, the quality of their own products continued to drop. Coincidence?
Now they are going after anything that looks like an electric guitar.
The general "S-style" body form, as popularised/iconified by the Stratocaster is popular for many reasons. A lot of those reasons (I would say most) are practical/functional.
Fender shouldn't be allowed to possess the shape, let alone use it as an anti-competitive weapon in order to coast along for another century just because the brand happens to come with some notable IP.
Fender's monopoly over the shape shouldn't be protected by law/courts. Here's why:
It's a functional design -- a matter of ergonomics and practicality. For a lot of guitarists, the S body style is the most effective, comfortable shape to play.
For a concrete example of an "iconic", yet clearly functional design feature: the top point of the "S" is where the front strap hook is. Having this point protrude forwards (along the neck) helps balance the weight and this provides the player with physical control over the mass of the guitar.
Many of the subtle features of Stratocaster body are obvious practical improvements -- it's the result of filing down sharp edges that were noticed when attempting the play the instrument. Imagine you're starting from a classical acoustic design, what steps would you take to make it more playable and make it electric at the same time?
It's an incremental design built on forms that have been used by luthiers for centuries. It's not a Fender shape -- it's an (electric) guitar shape.
No such contempt has one against another in Western culture as much as politicians have against their constituents, and trendsetter companies against the cultural heritage they helped to create.
In one fell swoop, Fender destroyed every bit of musician goodwill they had. For right or for wrong (and I think for wrong), their claims are baseless.
I wish them (and their PE overlords) a powerful defeat, ideally in a court of law, but if not, in the court of public opinion.
1) Fender got someone in Germany to buy a Strat type guitar from a Chinese vendor on Aliexpress and ship it to Germany (I assume this part)
2) Fender sued said small Chinese Aliexpress vendor in a regional German court for selling a "copied" design in Germany
3) The small Chinese guitar vendor didn't turn up, obviously
4) Fender got a default judgement that the S-type (Stratocaster etc.) guitar body shape (which has indisputably been in the public domain in the USA since 2009) is a "functional work of art" in which they have copyright.
5) Fender's weird law firm went on a rampage, in the EU and USA, using said default judgement as if it represents some kind of precedent, warning guitar firms (PRS included) and music retailers to stop selling them, recall and destroy their inventory on sale in the EU, and confirm they had done so, or be sued
6) guitar people, especially luthiers working in the USA who have solid reason to believe the S shape is public domain, took that about as well as you'd expect
7) Fender tried to walk it back, especially the bit about smashing perfectly good guitars
8) Thomann, based in Germany, certainly Fender's largest retailer outside the USA and one of the biggest music retailers in the world, have decided not to take it lying down.
This really reads like some american lawyer used an llm and never questioned whether legal precedent is even a thing in germany aside from the highest courts.
Have seen several like this in the last months, though in much more niche areas and with barely any publicity.
The law firm is Bird and Bird, and they are not that small.
So the whole thing really looks like legal bullying.
The S-type body shape has been in the public domain in the USA since 2009. One of the luthiers that Fender sent a C&D has hired the lawyer who secured that 2009 judgement against Fender, and he has been quite withering.
Fender have a huge uphill struggle here, and they clearly do not understand just how much time hobby guitarists with money spend watching Youtube. Big mistake.
This is extra bizarre to me, because for most purposes German law doesnt operate on a system of "legal precedent" the way countries which adopted the UK model do.
Am I missing something about Germany following a precedent system for patent/copyright or something, or is this even dumber than it sounds?
Sorry, I rushed through my comment and perhaps didn't make it clear.
They have a default judgement only. But they used it to demand US-based manufacturers recall European-bound inventory, destroy it and certify it destroyed.
Even though they know full well that inventory can legally be sold in the USA — which is part of the near-comical gaslighting walkback the FMIC CEO attempted the other day. They are already admitting it's not a USA thing.
As a legal theory, "this default judgement against an anonymous AliExpress seller is binding on literally everyone in the world" kinda reminds me of the Dune nft bros' "we bought a book about Dune and therefore now own the intellectual property rights to Dune."
Except this one is apparently coming from actual accredited lawyers? (Who knows, I'm not a lawyer, maybe it really does work that way and Fender is the first company to figure out how to exploit this)
Because the only way Trump Guitars can sell an LP-type guitar to US customers is that Gibson also lost a body-shape case like this (to Washburn, if I remember right?)
Quite likely, I have not seen the specific detail.
But the thing is, if the counterfeit had a Fender logo and a Fender Strat style headstock, they could simply have used trademarks to deal with that — because they do have internationally recognised trademarks and the specific headstock shape is one.
They instead claimed something rather more broad and contentious that has not been tested in court in the EU but is fully at odds with 17 years of guitar industry business built on a legal finding in the USA.
A cynic would say that FMIC knew the vendor would not turn up and fight.
They didn't sued Thomann and they didn't show up. They sued some Chinese guy who didn't show up and used that default judgement against everyone including Thomann.
Fender recently won a case in a german court, from which they assumed to own the copyright to the famous Stratocaster guitar shape. They then sent out cease and desist letters to many manufacturers who build and sell such guitars in Europe, asking them to destroy their inventory, etc. Among those manufacturers was PRS and also Thomann, which are now taking legal action against that.
I've always hated Fender. This pig fuckers used to charge about 50% extra for a lefty guitar, assuming you didnt want something like a Jazzmaster, which wasn't available in lefty for decades.
Worse part is that lefty fenders always have something fucked because they put zero care into them, despite charging a premium for them.
Fender doesnt even make a good product. I've pulled strat style guitars out of dumpsters that were better than a fender.
I have two strats. Both signature editions. Ed O'Brien and Mark Speer edition. I also have a fender accoustic which is perhaps my most favouritist guitar ever. I fucking love fender and will forever.
Leo Fender himself declined to copyright the Strat body
Leo Fender himself sold "Strat clones" of the exact variety Fender Corp is trying to ban, after the sold the Fender name. I own one.
So Fender Corp is trying to retroactively assert that Leo Fender stole his own design from Fender Corp in 1979, they didn't have any issue for 47 years, but now because a Chinese company didn't show up in German court, they have eternal license to the design Leo Fender explicitly chose not to sell them.
Fuck Fender. My Jazz Bass is still my favorite instrument, I've had it 20 years and played hundreds of gigs, but I guess I'm never buying another
I play guitar, I own a Fender guitar and a Fender amp, along with another non-fender amp and 2 other non Fender guitars.
I'm just super sick of hearing about this story. Guitar players online are way too worked up about this. Fender is being annoying, but there is no way I'm getting rid of my Fender guitar or amp over this, and there is no way any of this would stop me from buying another one.
The Fender shapes just don't need to be copied at all. I live near a famous boutique type shop. They may have some boutique guitars that rip off the shapes of Fenders, it's been tolerated, but they have a lot of guitars that don't rip off Fender shapes and many of them are really great guitars.
Too many players are acting like the sky is falling if Fender wins with any of this stuff. The sky is not going to fall. We'll go back to the way things used to be where Fender body shapes weren't ripped off so often and it will be fine.
I think some of the doom and gloom is also because too many players are super obsessed with buying more and more guitars all the time. It's all about what is the next purchase as opposed to just enjoying the guitar they have.
Fender has seen quality deteriorate to extremely concerning levels in the past 5-10 years, ask any luthier. That frustrated players and now this is icing on the cake as competition has surpassed them in quality and in value and now they come beating them up since they are seeing their piece of the marketplace get smaller.
But would you have refused to buy that guitar if it looked a little more different than a Fender Stratocaster?
You clearly aren't bothered by it having a different headstock shape, Suhr could and probably will just change the body shape a little bit and it would be fine.
Ibanez sells tons of guitars like this. They're double cutaway guitars that are kind of similar to the Stratocaster shape, but they are uniquely different and still loved.
The weirdest thing is someone who hates Fender and won't buy a Fender but simultaneously demands that their guitar looks so close to a Fender that it would be in danger of infringing.
It's really impressive how you could apparently argue so strongly for Fender's defense: but the message that I took away was Fender is obviously the bad guy in this story, and I want nothing to do with them... and I haven't even clicked on the new tab for the story yet.
Apparently Fender got bought up by a private equity fund, Servco Pacific Capital. Who would have guessed.
Apparently this started back in 1985.
> In 1985, Bill Schultz and a group of investors—including company employees and external companies like Servco Pacific Capitol—purchased Fender from CBS for $12.5 million and renamed it "Fender Musical Instruments Corporation" (FMIC).
> Ownership changed in December 2001, when private equity firm Weston Presidio bought a controlling stake in Fender for $57.8 million.
> Longtime investor Servco instead bought out Weston Presidio, with TPG Growth as an equal partner.
> In 2020, Servco bought out TPG Growth's stake, making them Fender's majority owner.
A long history of private equity ownership. I'm not sure CBS owning them would be much better, which started in 1965.
As much as I like to blame private equity for the downfall of once great companies, I'm not sure how to feel about this one, as they've been investor owned and passed around for decades.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fender_%28company%29
IIRC pre-GFC FMIC has a generally good reputation among guitarists, and certainly in comparison to the preceding era of Fender, when it was owned by CBS.
Schulz and co were a big step up from CBS, genuinely. Schulz was associated with the original company, not a random PE firm.
It's the 2000-2020 exchanges that were detrimental
This is true but the buyout happened in 1985. Servco Pacific has been in charge for longer than Leo Fender and CBS, the two previous owners, put together.
Fender? I barely knew 'er.
I play a Gretsch... which interestingly is actually "controlled" by Fender after looking it up; still owned by the Gretsch family
My ex and her bf have been doing this thing where they match any word. For example, "Cardio? I hardly startio." You can do this too now. You’re welcome.
(It’s surprisingly hard to think of a motivating example.)
Makes complete sense to me. Fender has immense cultural cachet among multiple big-spending demographics: blues boomers, Cobain disciples, indie kids, even the hair metal guys via Charvel. The Gibson/Harley-Davidson move of leveraging a company that makes stuff into a lifestyle brand is the play here. Fender would rather throw legal weight around to execute that than compete by building high-quality guitars at a good price.
Too many Clapton lawyers have gotten hip to boutique builders. Fender would rather make them buy a $5000 Masterbuilt Custom Shop Deluxe Roadworn Heritage Double Relic No-Caster than a Tom Anderson or Suhr. Same for kids buying Harley Bentons and ESPs - a $1000 Indonesian-built instrument is their future if Fender has anything to say about it.
> Fender would rather throw legal weight around to execute that than compete by building high-quality guitars at a good price.
The thing is, they already do that, or have in the relatively recent past. Arguably, they invented that move in the 1980s when they started selling non USA/Japanese models as Squier models.
There's only so much that brings them, though, and guitar music ain't what it used to be. The pie isn't growing very much (maybe at all) and now there's competition trying to capture more of the market.
Would Bill Schultz have done the same thing if the 80s and 90s hadn't been so good to rock music? Hard to say, but if the alternative was "No more Fender", maybe.
Masterbuilts are closer to $10k now, fwiw. Plenty of shop built CS hover around $5k or more.
The real change is that the private equity owners also recently bought reverb.com, and must've seen the numbers showing that people aren't buying as many new fenders as they are other brands, and because the only thing they know how to do is extract money from people by destroying rather than creating, they went down this super obvious PE playbook
I still think this whole Fender-suing-everyone thing will end up with Thomann owning them either partially or completely.
But the weird German lawsuit was always about the fact that some private equity suits (or bad Hawaiian shirts, it seems) are upset that Thomann (and others) sell the PRS Silver Sky, which as they have probably deduced from the reverb.com data they now own, likely outsells equivalent Fender models by some margin.
So I think Thomann are just bringing it on.
And they aren't the only ones: LSL hired the lawyer who won the judgement that put the S-type body shape in the public domain in 2009.
German lawsuits are far less expensive than … what we learn from huge american lawsuits in tv. Unlikely that Thomann will make piles of money. It‘s more about the right to keep selling those guitars and quite some marketing impact.
Thomann own an extremely popular brand, Harley Benton, which (obviously) sells S-types.
I think it’s more likely that this is about the ST series than about the Silver Sky.
The new CEO of Fender is from the luxury goods world.
Each Silver Sky model (SE or non) outsells the equivalent Stratocaster model, from what I understand, by a noticeable margin, which Servco will now know with clarity, because they have sales data from reverb (which they acquired one month before they took out this lawsuit).
It is a naïve take, but have a look at what Fender's CEO looks like, how he dresses and carries himself, and tell me that a big part of this isn't injured pride that John Mayer went to PRS.
I think if this was really about the cheap body guitars — a nearly zero-margin market for decades — they wouldn't have sent a C&D to LsL or PRS, because that was always going to invite trouble.
Harley Benton is a problem at some small level and I am sure Fender will suggest it is, but Fender have had a "buy the real thing" type of marketing campaign for both Fender and Squier since the 90s at least.
The 2009 lawsuit made this clear; it detailed all Fender's "buy original" marketing campaigns as a way of pointing out that Fender has never policed the right to make the S-type body shape.
Squier competes pretty adequately with Harley Benton and all the other cheap brands; at that price, being "Fender's budget brand" has prudence associated with it.
What has changed is that Fender are losing out at the top end to high-end luthiers who give a shit, and PRS. And now they know exactly how badly. This lawsuit will feature a lot of data from reverb.com, I suspect.
This is incredibly hard to believe, Fender is many times bigger than PRS.
Fender sells at least 10x more guitars than PRS.
Harley Benton is "extremly popular"? I don't think so and the upper price ceiling for HB seems to be at ~400-500 USD right now. Decent hardware for anyone just starting out with their first instrument, sure, but i never heard of anyone buying a HB as a second or third guitar.
Surprised you don’t think HB is extremely popular. Perhaps you’re outside of Europe?
I used to work for a Thomann competitor "Musicstore" in ~2005.
The server was some tower server in a back office with a note reminding everyone not to turn it off.
With Thoman being hugged to death right now I would like to think of there being a similar situation (its probably fine, but it made me feel nostalgic).
Similar work experience, I was with a CBS-owned music company that had a CNC machine with some old Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster body templates.
The hardware manager was cool and would let employees turn slabs of wood into Tele- and Strat-style bodies after hours.
When the Fender/German court ruling came down, my first thought was: Fender has had roughly 70 years with the Stratocaster design, and the broader industry has been making S-style guitars for decades.
Surely at some point a body shape becomes generic, right?
Leo Fender patented the Strat design, the body became public domain when the patent expired in I think 1965. More recently a US court ruled that only the headstock design of a guitar remains intellectual property, because there's really only so many ways to design the body of a guitar
Leo himself did not copyright the design and himself sold "clones" after selling the Fender brand
It's never belonged to Fender Corp
Things become generic if you stop defending them/enforcing your IP.
I think the iPhone at one time defended the design of its “squircle” corners. Eventually settling out of court.
I think you're thinking of trademark, but this isn't a trademark claim, it's a copyright infringement claim. The legal question is whether the guitar shape can be copyrighted.
That is the legal question FMIC think they have settled with this legal win, yes.
Two legal questions they will now be asked, by Thomann or LsL, are:
- if such a copyright could exist, what shape precisely are Fender arguing it would cover?
- if such a copyright could exist, would Fender (the company) have title to it?
Answering these questions could get them into some difficulty, legally. Neither are obvious and the second one is really problematic.
It would be odd to try this as copyrightable in the U.S, where there’s a pretty clear distinction between art added to a guitar, like PRS bird inlays, and the core body shape.
That's why they aren't trying this in the US (yet), where the bodies were explicitly declared public domain. They're trying to turn a default judgement into something bigger in the EU.
I think so. But also they lost even their case to make a trademark of it:
https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/fender-loses-guitar-...
https://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=91161403&pty=OPP&eno...
You would think this would have been quite an easy win, because regardless of who makes guitars with S-type bodies, the outline of the Stratocaster or Telecaster is surely sufficiently identifiable with Fender as to be something they could at least claim should be their trademark in certain categories (on merchandise etc.)
Fender failed to prove that if people saw a line art outline of the Stratocaster, they would associate it first with "Fender". And indeed an illustrated dictionary at the time used such an outline to just generically illustrate "Electric guitar", apparently.
And in that finding:
This was in 2009, when it was clear that Fender had never "policed" the body shape until that point.And this — from a deposition from Warmoth as far as I can determine (they made spare parts) which makes it clear that Fender never entered into an agreement with Warmouth about the body shape, only the neck (because of the headstock shape which they believed was trademarked):
So this is Warmoth, in 2009, saying that Fender never asked them to license the body shape as far back as 1979 (which is also, if I remember reading correctly, when Schecter and G&L started making S-type guitars)So even if they do have ownership of some kind of copyright, they've never asserted it before and three decades of their own conduct kind of militates against them being able to enforce it.
And they aren't the only ones, the finding goes on because Fender took action against multiple companies (this is around page 30–40 or so).
The 1950s were a different era. Industrial and functional designs and were not protected.
Leo knew and acknowledged his body inspirations (Bigsby and Rickenbacker), and considered his true IP to be in sound, pickups, mechanics, tremolo...
I really wish Warmoth or PRS could get some legal fee subsidizing to push back.
It seems like something you could get a design patent for but these are only good for 15 years.
Yeah sure biggest european music ecommerce store runs on tower server in a back office.
Happens all the time.
No it doesn't? We are not in 1998.
I always read around here how european server companies are incompetent so there is no european infrastructure so european companies have to host everything on AWS. But this biggest european music store apparently powers their huge store from some server in the back office?
Which is it?
We are very much still exactly in 1998.
This is a place where European copyright law is significantly different from US copyright law. In the US, copyright cannot cover a "functional part", which is why there is a third party auto parts industry. Improved functionality can be covered by a utility patent, but that lasts only 20 years. Designs can be protected by design patents, which last only 15 years. So in the US, any rights left in the form of the Stratocaster expired long ago.
US companies sometimes try to make "trade dress" or trademark claims, but that's much weaker than copyright.
Fender has protected the strat design under the claim of "work of applied art" (https://spotlight.fender.com/newsroom/news/1004) which is also a concept in US copyright law, they just don't have a judgement for it etc. in their favour, unlike in Europe.
That article, and LLMs, seem to pick up on an article from US Legal Forms.[1] That article itself reads like something written by an LLM.
A more serious review of the works of applied art problem comes from the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts.[2] That article ends with "Thus, the 'separability' line Congress has drawn, albeit often difficult to discern coherently, places most overall designs of useful articles in the public domain." Separability means being able to take the decorative design off the useful object. This covers logos on T-shirts, for example. A T-shirt with no logo still works as a T-shirt. But if you can't take the decorative part off the functional object, it's not separable. The common squiggle-shaped bicycle rack is an excellent example. That won design awards and is admired, but it's not copyrightable - you can't take the squiggle off the bike rack and still have the bike rack.[3]
The Fender Stratocaster hits that limit - take away the Strat form, and there's no guitar there.
[1] https://legal-resources.uslegalforms.com/a/applied-art-doctr...
[2] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/a...
[3] Brandir Int’l, Inc. v. Cascade Pac.Lumber Co https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/834...
I can't find the details, but this needs to be under the copyright laws of the 1950s, which were very different from today. If they didn't properly register and re-register the copyright over the years the copyright is public domain. A lawyer will need to figure out these details of course.
Edit: of course this case is in Germany, so US law doesn't apply and I claim not information on what their laws are.
European copyright law has broader coverage than US law. Europe recognizes "sweat of the brow" copyright. Some databases are copyrightable in the EU even though there was no human creativity involved. The US does not do that, because the copyright clause in the Constitution limits the reach of intellectual property law. See Feist vs. Rural Telephone (phone directories not copyrightable), Bridgeman vs. Corel (copies of public domain content not copyrightable), and Meshwerks vs. Toyota (3D scans of real world objects not copyrightable). The way new cases are going, AI-created content mostly isn't copyrightable, either.
How was European copyright law in the 1950s? That is relevant here and I don't know.
But technically the guitar does not have to have a shape of a strat. It could be any other shape, why not be creative and make your own design?
FMIC likely cannot even properly identify the allegedly protected shape of the Strat because they sell multiple Stratocasters that have different body shapes and proportions. They may simply not be able to say "it's this thick", even, because they sell Strats with different thicknesses. They might not be able to say "it has these body contours" because they sell flat, edge-bound Stratocasters. The list goes on.
Plus, FMIC may not even be able to prove that they legally own any rights that do exist! It's not at all clear they acquired the long-lived rights from Leo Fender when he sold to CBS; they only secured a ten year agreement not to compete, and the design patent they had on some aspects of the body shape would have expired in 1969 or 1970.
The body shape is in the public domain in the USA; it has been for 17 years.
Part of me thinks that they are insane and part of me thinks they want to be acquired because they have debts.
This is exactly the argument that the lawyer for LSL guitars is making - who happens to be the same lawyer that beat Fender back in 2009 on behalf of the USPTO and cost them the copyright in the US :)
(Absolutely baller move for LSL to hire that guy)
FWIW I think if it is true they also sent a letter to Ibanez — presumably about the AZES, which is the only thing really close — then that is where it gets interesting.
Because the AZES is clearly a double-cutaway S-type guitar shape, but it is just different enough to spot. And that then raises the question of whether Fender's own variations are as noticeable, because one of theirs has an AZES-type top cutaway.
This is when the penny dropped for me on that first point — when I read last week they had sent a letter to Ibanez.
Fender's weird CEO did say it's "not about all double cutaway" guitars. But if it is about a PRS and it is about an Ibanez, they are going to have to get somewhat specific about what they are claiming.
Everything Fender's CEO said in that meeting was a lie to appease retailers
Yep. Brutal.
ETA: I reckon Fender will fold, because I think the second point is entirely possible. If CBS could have stopped Leo Fender selling S- and T-type body shapes entirely on the basis of what they owned, why did they only secure what amounts to a non-compete agreement?
The big risk for FMIC is in discovery on this point, I reckon. It will do a lot of harm to their reputation if it turns out they have been properly advised they have no claim and they've gone ahead anyway.
Maybe the law should protect creative part of the shape (that doesn't affect the sound)? I do not know but I think that designing a good instrument is not easy and it is not cool that someone can just copy it without doing any work.
That is effectively what Fender are claiming they now have in Europe (off the back of a case that was not even argued because the vendor didn't turn up).
One key thing here is that the Stratocaster did have a design patent attached, and when your design patent expires, that's it; none of that is protected.
But the guitar was designed in 1954 (and indeed the body shape in 1951, fundamentally, because the Fender Precision bass guitar looked like that first). So the design patent was gone by 1970.
At the time, US copyright did not apply to functional shapes, and most of the core aspects of the Strat shape are actually functional — cutaways and sculpting.
Manufacturers like Schecter were making guitars with an S body shape by 1979. So this isn't new, and it is weird.
> that doesn't affect the sound
That would be the whole shape.
I do not think the exact shape has any influence, especially potentiometer or audio jack placement.
> I do not think the exact shape has any influence
Yes, that's what I said.
It influences playability, which is functionality. Fender's marketing advertised the shape as a functional feature: body carve for easier playing standing up, double cut for easier access to higher frets
Haha I was going to say that but I thought, no, I don't need the downvotes. Lots of guitarists here (including me)
72 years later?
Ergonomics. Any solid-body guitar that's designed to be comfortable when played sitting or standing will converge on a strat-ish body shape. You can make a computer mouse in any shape, but the shape of a comfortable mouse is constrained by the shape of an average human palm.
The various curves and bevels on the Stratocaster aren't arbitrary aesthetic features, they're affordances to fit the human body. Change them too much and you get a guitar that won't balance on your knee or that pokes you in the ribs or that limits your access to the high frets.
Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible. His design is both radical and basically derivative of the Strat, because Leo Fender happened to find something close to the perfect solution in 1954.
https://strandbergguitars.com/en-GB/product/boden-essential-...
But, for example, are those horns (?) necessary for ergonomics? Do the potentiometers and output jack have to be positioned like that? Does the pickguard has to be the same shape? I do not think so. Les Pauls have different shape and are pretty popular too.
> Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible
It looks somewhat ... not how you expect the guitar to look.
> But, for example, are those horns (?) necessary for ergonomics?
More or less, yes.
If you "fill" the cutways on a Strat you have a typical guitar shape.
You want the upper horn there or somewhere near it because the upper strap lug needs to be about there for balance, but some players (especially those with bigger hands) will want their thumb to be free from being blocked by the top of the guitar while they are playing the higher frets, so there's a cutaway. You then want the lower horn to have some of the classic shape below it if you want the guitar to be playable sitting down.
The slope across the top corner of the Strat beyond the bridge is there so that players (in particular guitarists who wear their guitars a bit higher with the fretboard pointing more upwards) don't have the upper arm of their right hand leaning uncomfortably across the edge of the guitar.
Some of these elements were protected by Leo Fender's original design patent, I think, but I can't remember which.
[flagged]
There's an article related to the headline linked at the top which explains it.
"The upper horn ensures perfect balance, the cutaways make it easier to play in the upper registers, and the contours of the body increase playing comfort. The shape of the Stratocaster was created to provide musicians with the most functional and ergonomic tool possible.
This is exactly why it has been taken up, developed further and reinterpreted by luthiers all over the world over decades."
Because strats sell. Oddly shaped guitars don't, or at least not for a long time, and would never break into the top 10 best selling guitar shapes.
To be fair there is nothing in the shape that makes it sound better than other guitars; so it is not like those modem chip makers or video codec developers that patent the only optimal way to achieve the goal and prevent anybody from competing. Fender does not prevent anyone from making a better guitar. So I do not like copying. It would be better if everyone used their own unique shape rather than something from 50s.
The argument has nothing to do with the sound. A strat style guitar is characterized by:
- Flat top
- Solid body, typically softer/lighter woods
- Bolt-on neck (as opposed to set or through-body)
- Double cutout (as opposed to single/no cutout, V, or other irregular shaped necks) with a longer cutout on top compared to the bottom
- Carved cavity in the top of the body
- "Loaded" pickguard (electronics mounted to it, instead of the body)
- Straight jack mounted into the pickguard
- "Tummy tuck" carved in the back
- Fat/flat shaped bottom of the body like a tele, as opposed to rounded like an LP.
All of these are functional properties of the guitar that have tradeoffs and benefits compared to other designs.
You can have two strats sound completely different but look identical to the untrained eye and the reason for preferring the style has a lot to do with the weight of the instrument and how that weight is distributed when playing standing, and how the body fits in your hands/arms and against your body. There's an argument to be made that the strat is near optimal for comfort in playing.
If you look at competing designs that (PRS McCarty, Ibanez, Schecter, Gretsch - basically anyone) the specific curves may be different but they all look like a Strat because it's genuinely hard to design a different body that feels the same.
The St Vincent signature is one style that I think needs to get more popular but it's not for everyone.
Yes but there are exact or almost exact clones like this (it even has Fender logo, but the price is suspicious): [1] [2]
[1] https://chinese-guitars.com/products/black-stratocaster-styl...
[2] https://e-catalog.com/KRAMER-FOCUS-VT-211S.htm
Kramer has been selling strat clones for 40+ years and a big reason they got popular in the 80s was because they were building guitars Fender wouldn't - they just had the same/similar body shape.
Also that first example is a Fender, afaict. Fender has been making cheap strats and teles in China for years. They used to do it exclusively under the Squire brand name but that changed about a decade ago.
But I think people who want to buy a strat, would prefer to buy a Fender strat and not a cheaper copy that has the same shape but might sound worse?
I personally do not like the price though.
OTH people who want to buy strat would prefer to buy "strat with all inherited problems already fixed", be it PRS silver sky, or any boutique brand like LSL / Sandberg / Suhr / Tom Anderson.
I don't play electric guitar (fretted, anyway) at the moment, and I think John Mayer is very beige, but the Silver Sky SE is a really good guitar. They fixed a lot of stuff, and the lower cutaway is really nicely done.
> would prefer to buy a Fender strat
I don't think that's true at all. A strat ("strat style" or "s-style") is a shape and configuration. Many of the non-Fender strats are perfectly fine guitars (I have one) from major manufacturers like Ibanez, ESR, Jackson, and others. See forex: https://www.sweetwater.com/c589--S_style--Electric_Guitars
Those mostly do not look like copies; they have slightly different shape, the jack is located in a different place, Ibanez has shaper horns, the pickups are different, many do not have a pickguard. However, PRS Silver Sky looks somewhat close to the original to me, although it has a different headstock.
What I meant by "copy" is when it looks exactly the same.
The Silver Sky also has a scalloped lower cutaway.
Fender will have a difficult time claiming much in the way of the design of the pickups or pickguard, or the tremelo bridge, because some of that was in the original design patent anyway, and that is long expired.
Plus, for example, the two-pivot trem bridge design they use now that has been copied is not the same as in the patent; they actually copied this innovation themselves. And they use different tuners I think.
Much of this stuff has been litigated already in 2009. And again, a really important point is that back in 2009 they could not prove they had chain of title to even make any claim of copyright, even if such a claim were possible.
FMIC could not or would not demonstrate that they had ownership (and there is really good, very obvious evidence in the market that CBS could not prove that in 1969 either)
So if the Thomann case goes to court in Europe they will have to prove they do, and if it gets into a discovery process the court might hear that Fender have been advised that they definitely do not, and that would be devastating, because that would cast the letters they have been sending in a very different light.
I'm looking at buying one now and as far as I can tell Fender seems to make shoddy quality instruments these days. I see a lot of recommendations for PRS and others.
I wish there was some kind of audio comparison.
It would just end up a comparison of the pickups, because to a first approximation that's the only thing that matters.
Fender makes a whole series of Strats at different price points. The challenge is even at the high end Fender has inconsistent QA, so the 'knockoffs' are sometimes way better quality/consistency. See this video for more info: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OU7RUpkXsV0
Can't compete on quality, so compete by attempting to use the courts to bludgeon your competitors. A tale as old as capitalism
I think I watched that video but sadly there is no sound comparison to demonstrate the quality issues.
A lot of guitar quality signals will not show through easily in the sound. Like how easy or difficult it is to fret the strings, how well it stays in tune in a controlled environment over time, fit and finish work, etc. That kind of stuff makes the difference between a guitar that can be played, and a guitar which is fun to play.
Right.
Almost all of the variation between sufficiently similar electric guitars, barring the quality of the pickups and maybe some of the electronics, can be eliminated in the setup.
And a lot of the expensive luxury stuff people are convinced has an impact on the sound has approximately zero impact on the sound.
sound doesn't really tell you about quality issues, quality issue are more does it have any fret ends that cut into your fingers as you move up and down the neck, are any of the frets too high and causing buzzing, does it maintain its pitch or do you frequently need to re-tune it, is it well setup from the factory, are the strings too high, things like that.
Making two guitars sound similar, especially if the goal was that these guitars should sound similar, isn't all that hard. But also just because they're both the same style of guitar, doesn't mean the goal was for them to sound the same. Even just looking at Fender's line up, different strats have different pickups which are designed to sound different
A lot of it is also the history associated with all the strat cats from the 1950s onwards and really good marketing by fender, you're buying a real strat because you want to be in that company (Buddy Holly to Gilmour etc). I recall only wanting a strat when i was in my wannabe-yngwie phase. nothing else would fit.
Those who don’t know what this is about may appreciate Rick Beato’s (a guitar music vlogger) rant about it
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OU7RUpkXsV0
I think this makes some excellent points.
In particular the cultural impact of the S-shape guitar has been enhanced by people playing non-Fender S-shapes.
Think Eddie van Halen on his Frankenstrat which has it's own Wikipedia entry and has been displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was probably a Charvel body.
That goes to the heart of the "work of applied art" argument.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_(guitar)
Fender own Charvel so that's okay.
And if somebody here doesn't follow his channel, he is the guy who does easily the best music interviews on YouTube.
https://web.archive.org/web/20260624025836/https://www.thoma...
Recent and related:
Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189539 - May 2026 (132 comments)
This makes me want to buy a new PRS. At Thomann.
502 Bad Gateway, the HN kiss of death
Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260624025836/https://www.thoma...
Works fine here…
Dead for me, as is the archive link.
Still works... it's not showing as using a CDN, in fact they seem to own their IPv4 space (212.204.75.161) and getting connectivity from a midsize Bavarian ISP (M-net). Maybe there's a routing problem somewhere. The path for me is <my ISP> - DE-CIX - their ISP.
The problem is that after their original patent expired, they sat on their hands for too long. By the time they tried to trademark in 2008/2009, their bodies were considered generic in the US. Gibson, on the other hand, did what Fender should have done and applied for trademark (for their Les Paul body) back in the late 80s.
Now other brands are eating their lunch, and Fender is seemingly trying a last hail marry to get this settled. My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts.
"My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts." That's exactly what they have done, they sued a Chinese company that was making knock-off Strat copies and selling them in Germany. Fender sued them, the Chinese company was a no show and Fender took that as a win to go after PRS who is selling a John Mayer Strat style guitar.
A win that, as I understand it, did not actually set a precedent and is thus of no actual legal use to them.
I would agree with you. I don’t think it will be enough for them to win in the US.
On a side note, think how conservative music world is, if people are still manufacturing and successfully sell guitar designed in 50s. You can probably take a 50s guitar and connect to a modern amp, or take a modern guitar and connect to a 50s amp and it will work.
Compare this, for example, to smartphone chargers or headphones and their compatibility.
Smartphone chargers had legitimate reason to change. Higher power, faster data, and we learned the hard way that micro usb and all the proprietary connectors before it were fundamentally physically flawed.
Audio hasn't changed at all in the last two centuries. An analog audio signal is fundamental physics and there's nothing to gain or change or improve in any meaningful sense. TRS/phono jacks likewise are just so brute force stupid and rugged that there was never a reason to change.
The connectors and interfaces never changed because the underlying signals never changed because there's nothing to change. Digial electronics on the other hand legitimately have gone through real and worthwhile changes, and been radically redefined many times in the last 60 years.
Mini USB was clunky, but how was it flawed? Unless you count data transfer rates as physical. Never seen one break.
This is completely true, and there's a good reason.
Almost everything anyone has tried to do to modernize electric guitars in a non-compatible way has had big downsides.
Almost any guitar with a pre-amp or whatever built into it that would allow it to use a cable like an XLR cable ends up needing batteries in the guitar, which then introduce a maintenance/failure point. And very often efforts to introduce this stuff haven't sounded great.
The only place this has kind of changed is super high gain guitars for metal. They are more likely to use active pickups, they'll have a battery, but they still use standard cabling for compatibility.
Anything that is modernized ends up being more expensive and harder to work on yourself. A basic guitar like a Strat or Tele has incredibly simple electronics and is super easy for any guitar player to learn to fix themselves, and most of the parts inside are super cheap. And it all just works really well.
And the audience never cares, they care about the notes you choose to play and the message the musician cares to get across.
Oh yeah, you can plug a guitar made in the 50's to an amp that was made yesterday and vice versa with zero issues.
> You can probably
No need for "probably". That absolutely works.
"Who says you need to buy a guitar?"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_F7aiOvdwE
(technically a "diddley bow": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diddley_bow)
Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius
As an amusing aside, Stradivarius could not have known how his fiddles would sound today. Most of them have been modernized, with new necks and bass bar, and some other tweaks. Most are played with metal or synthetic strings, and modern bows.
why would the connector need to change? nothing has come out that's really better for analog signals
If signals were based on low impedance current loops as opposed to voltage-based like they are today, interference could be much reduced. This would break phantom power, so power to preamps would have to be send through another set of conductors, which would make the design of the electronics easier as well as safer.
Of course, none of this will ever happen.
I do find it hilarious that the phono jack appeared fully formed and hasn't changed in a hundred years. We got the smaller flavors of TRS sure, but the big honking quarter inch phono jack has stayed exactly the same. Perfect design in one go, no notes.
They were originally ball-ended. Some refinement has happened.
xlr?
It's not really better. And no, it's not inherently balanced. TRS can carry a balanced signal. I've seen a mixer that had TRS balanced mono outputs.
Sometimes engineers find the optimal or near optimal design early on in the life of a technology. Jet airplanes haven’t changed much since the 1960s.
Even if you think Fender is solely responsible for the design, which is frankly ridiculous, the bloody thing's been around forever and now they're suing?
Having a court stop actual counterfeits -- sure, nobody has a problem with that. That's not what this is.
Then there was the headstock thing, Fender was notorious for pursuing makers of guitars with headstocks that had any resemblance to the Strat headstock. Let's ignore how limited the design space is considering the constraints of six strings - six tuners at the end of a narrow strip of timber. Fender was obviously acting in an anti-competitive way at that point. At the same time, the quality of their own products continued to drop. Coincidence?
Now they are going after anything that looks like an electric guitar.
The general "S-style" body form, as popularised/iconified by the Stratocaster is popular for many reasons. A lot of those reasons (I would say most) are practical/functional.
Fender shouldn't be allowed to possess the shape, let alone use it as an anti-competitive weapon in order to coast along for another century just because the brand happens to come with some notable IP.
Fender's monopoly over the shape shouldn't be protected by law/courts. Here's why:
It's a functional design -- a matter of ergonomics and practicality. For a lot of guitarists, the S body style is the most effective, comfortable shape to play.
For a concrete example of an "iconic", yet clearly functional design feature: the top point of the "S" is where the front strap hook is. Having this point protrude forwards (along the neck) helps balance the weight and this provides the player with physical control over the mass of the guitar.
Many of the subtle features of Stratocaster body are obvious practical improvements -- it's the result of filing down sharp edges that were noticed when attempting the play the instrument. Imagine you're starting from a classical acoustic design, what steps would you take to make it more playable and make it electric at the same time?
It's an incremental design built on forms that have been used by luthiers for centuries. It's not a Fender shape -- it's an (electric) guitar shape.
No such contempt has one against another in Western culture as much as politicians have against their constituents, and trendsetter companies against the cultural heritage they helped to create.
In one fell swoop, Fender destroyed every bit of musician goodwill they had. For right or for wrong (and I think for wrong), their claims are baseless.
I wish them (and their PE overlords) a powerful defeat, ideally in a court of law, but if not, in the court of public opinion.
I am confused. What is this about?
1) Fender got someone in Germany to buy a Strat type guitar from a Chinese vendor on Aliexpress and ship it to Germany (I assume this part)
2) Fender sued said small Chinese Aliexpress vendor in a regional German court for selling a "copied" design in Germany
3) The small Chinese guitar vendor didn't turn up, obviously
4) Fender got a default judgement that the S-type (Stratocaster etc.) guitar body shape (which has indisputably been in the public domain in the USA since 2009) is a "functional work of art" in which they have copyright.
5) Fender's weird law firm went on a rampage, in the EU and USA, using said default judgement as if it represents some kind of precedent, warning guitar firms (PRS included) and music retailers to stop selling them, recall and destroy their inventory on sale in the EU, and confirm they had done so, or be sued
6) guitar people, especially luthiers working in the USA who have solid reason to believe the S shape is public domain, took that about as well as you'd expect
7) Fender tried to walk it back, especially the bit about smashing perfectly good guitars
8) Thomann, based in Germany, certainly Fender's largest retailer outside the USA and one of the biggest music retailers in the world, have decided not to take it lying down.
This really reads like some american lawyer used an llm and never questioned whether legal precedent is even a thing in germany aside from the highest courts.
Have seen several like this in the last months, though in much more niche areas and with barely any publicity.
The law firm is Bird and Bird, and they are not that small.
So the whole thing really looks like legal bullying.
The S-type body shape has been in the public domain in the USA since 2009. One of the luthiers that Fender sent a C&D has hired the lawyer who secured that 2009 judgement against Fender, and he has been quite withering.
Fender have a huge uphill struggle here, and they clearly do not understand just how much time hobby guitarists with money spend watching Youtube. Big mistake.
This is extra bizarre to me, because for most purposes German law doesnt operate on a system of "legal precedent" the way countries which adopted the UK model do.
Am I missing something about Germany following a precedent system for patent/copyright or something, or is this even dumber than it sounds?
It's that dumb.
Sorry, I rushed through my comment and perhaps didn't make it clear.
They have a default judgement only. But they used it to demand US-based manufacturers recall European-bound inventory, destroy it and certify it destroyed.
Even though they know full well that inventory can legally be sold in the USA — which is part of the near-comical gaslighting walkback the FMIC CEO attempted the other day. They are already admitting it's not a USA thing.
Yikes. I guess we'll find out in a couple months that Fender had replaced their legal department with ChatGPT 3 or something.
As a legal theory, "this default judgement against an anonymous AliExpress seller is binding on literally everyone in the world" kinda reminds me of the Dune nft bros' "we bought a book about Dune and therefore now own the intellectual property rights to Dune."
Except this one is apparently coming from actual accredited lawyers? (Who knows, I'm not a lawyer, maybe it really does work that way and Fender is the first company to figure out how to exploit this)
If it does work that way then this is going to get very funny, isn't it?
https://gettrumpguitars.com
Because the only way Trump Guitars can sell an LP-type guitar to US customers is that Gibson also lost a body-shape case like this (to Washburn, if I remember right?)
For (1), not a fender style, a straight up counterfeit
Quite likely, I have not seen the specific detail.
But the thing is, if the counterfeit had a Fender logo and a Fender Strat style headstock, they could simply have used trademarks to deal with that — because they do have internationally recognised trademarks and the specific headstock shape is one.
They instead claimed something rather more broad and contentious that has not been tested in court in the EU but is fully at odds with 17 years of guitar industry business built on a legal finding in the USA.
A cynic would say that FMIC knew the vendor would not turn up and fight.
aliexpress? Thomann themselves are big in manufacturing guitars in china.
They didn't sued Thomann and they didn't show up. They sued some Chinese guy who didn't show up and used that default judgement against everyone including Thomann.
Fascinating isn't it, considering Thomann, a major seller of Chinese-manufactured S-type guitars, was right there
Fender recently won a case in a german court, from which they assumed to own the copyright to the famous Stratocaster guitar shape. They then sent out cease and desist letters to many manufacturers who build and sell such guitars in Europe, asking them to destroy their inventory, etc. Among those manufacturers was PRS and also Thomann, which are now taking legal action against that.
I've always hated Fender. This pig fuckers used to charge about 50% extra for a lefty guitar, assuming you didnt want something like a Jazzmaster, which wasn't available in lefty for decades.
Worse part is that lefty fenders always have something fucked because they put zero care into them, despite charging a premium for them.
Fender doesnt even make a good product. I've pulled strat style guitars out of dumpsters that were better than a fender.
Good luck, but they've already destroyed the name, all they have left to make money is IP, pretty sure they're only focused on this.
I have two strats. Both signature editions. Ed O'Brien and Mark Speer edition. I also have a fender accoustic which is perhaps my most favouritist guitar ever. I fucking love fender and will forever.
This one really bothers me:
Leo Fender himself declined to copyright the Strat body
Leo Fender himself sold "Strat clones" of the exact variety Fender Corp is trying to ban, after the sold the Fender name. I own one.
So Fender Corp is trying to retroactively assert that Leo Fender stole his own design from Fender Corp in 1979, they didn't have any issue for 47 years, but now because a Chinese company didn't show up in German court, they have eternal license to the design Leo Fender explicitly chose not to sell them.
Fuck Fender. My Jazz Bass is still my favorite instrument, I've had it 20 years and played hundreds of gigs, but I guess I'm never buying another
[dead]
[dead]
I play guitar, I own a Fender guitar and a Fender amp, along with another non-fender amp and 2 other non Fender guitars.
I'm just super sick of hearing about this story. Guitar players online are way too worked up about this. Fender is being annoying, but there is no way I'm getting rid of my Fender guitar or amp over this, and there is no way any of this would stop me from buying another one.
The Fender shapes just don't need to be copied at all. I live near a famous boutique type shop. They may have some boutique guitars that rip off the shapes of Fenders, it's been tolerated, but they have a lot of guitars that don't rip off Fender shapes and many of them are really great guitars.
Too many players are acting like the sky is falling if Fender wins with any of this stuff. The sky is not going to fall. We'll go back to the way things used to be where Fender body shapes weren't ripped off so often and it will be fine.
I think some of the doom and gloom is also because too many players are super obsessed with buying more and more guitars all the time. It's all about what is the next purchase as opposed to just enjoying the guitar they have.
Fender has seen quality deteriorate to extremely concerning levels in the past 5-10 years, ask any luthier. That frustrated players and now this is icing on the cake as competition has surpassed them in quality and in value and now they come beating them up since they are seeing their piece of the marketplace get smaller.
I've been playing long enough that I disagree.
Fender's quality is very good now compared to when I started playing.
But so is everyone else's.
I'll take my Suhr "Strat" over any American made Strat any day, as well as my hand wired boutique amp over any pro reverb (new or vintage).
But would you have refused to buy that guitar if it looked a little more different than a Fender Stratocaster?
You clearly aren't bothered by it having a different headstock shape, Suhr could and probably will just change the body shape a little bit and it would be fine.
Ibanez sells tons of guitars like this. They're double cutaway guitars that are kind of similar to the Stratocaster shape, but they are uniquely different and still loved.
The weirdest thing is someone who hates Fender and won't buy a Fender but simultaneously demands that their guitar looks so close to a Fender that it would be in danger of infringing.
the shape is in the public domain though? it would be like trying to patent a rounded rectangle, it's inherently silly
It's really impressive how you could apparently argue so strongly for Fender's defense: but the message that I took away was Fender is obviously the bad guy in this story, and I want nothing to do with them... and I haven't even clicked on the new tab for the story yet.
F*ck em - let them have that body shape. Seriously at this point do we need more stratocaster shaped guitars?
There's so many cool companies doing unique body shapes, if you're gonna take the time to build a guitar why not put some thought into the design?