> 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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 stuff people are convinced has an impact on the sound has approximately zero impact on the sound.
I am a lap steel player. I think it's pretty obvious if you play electric lap steel that the only things that make a meaningful difference are scale length, string gauge, pickup type, and pickup height/placement. (And possibly scale length and string gauge fold from a compound into one simple variable: string tension).
(Acoustic lap steel, it's all in play, so to speak. Massive variety in available tones)
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."
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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 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.
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.
> 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
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.
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 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).
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?
I think the iPhone at one time defended its corners. Eventually settling out of court.
US companies sometimes try to make "trade dress" or trademark claims, but that's much weaker than copyright.
Edit: of course this case is in Germany, so US law doesn't apply and I claim not information on what their laws are.
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.
(Absolutely baller move for LSL to hire that guy)
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.
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 would be the whole shape.
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-...
> Ola Strandberg set out to design the most ergonomic guitar possible
It looks somewhat ... not how you expect the guitar to look.
- 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.
I personally do not like the price though.
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
What I meant by "copy" is when it looks exactly the same.
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 stuff people are convinced has an impact on the sound has approximately zero impact on the sound.
I am a lap steel player. I think it's pretty obvious if you play electric lap steel that the only things that make a meaningful difference are scale length, string gauge, pickup type, and pickup height/placement. (And possibly scale length and string gauge fold from a compound into one simple variable: string tension).
(Acoustic lap steel, it's all in play, so to speak. Massive variety in available tones)
"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."
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.
https://youtube.com/watch?v=OU7RUpkXsV0
Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189539 - May 2026 (132 comments)
Compare this, for example, to smartphone chargers or headphones and their compatibility.
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.
No need for "probably". That absolutely works.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_F7aiOvdwE
(technically a "diddley bow": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diddley_bow)
Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260624025836/https://www.thoma...
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.
Have seen several like this in the last months, though in much more niche areas and with barely any publicity.
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.
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.
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)
https://gettrumpguitars.com
Because the only way Trump Guitars can sell an LP-type guitar is that Gibson also lost a body-shape case like this (to Washburn, if I remember right?)
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'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.