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Although I thought a company was obliged to defend their trademarks if they wanted to keep them.
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05-19-2026 04:39 AM
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They recent ruling in Germany was over copyright, not trademark. Fender has consistently and successfully defended the headstock shape as a trademark. This is a new legal tack for them.
Originally Posted by CliffR
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Today I learned that Tim Pierce cares about his friends who work for Fender.
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Seems to have ignited an internet guitar firestorm but as I noted, plenty of people still buy Dimarzios even after Larry secured a trademark for the double cream coils on a humbucker. Probably even more ludicrous and petty.
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Ah, the joys of vulture capitalism.
Fender has been a shrinking company since Leo Fender sold it and left. There was a brief resurrection, but those days are gone. Like Gibson and Martin, Fender is forced to compete on a losing footing with its own past let alone other manufacturers building better Stratocasters often at cheaper prices. Fender keeps trying to compete with the '57 Strat and the '52 Tele; Gibson with the '59 Les Paul; and Martin with the prewar D and OM/0/00/000 guitars. They can't win that competition because the world has changed too much. In Fender's case, these were always mass-produced utility guitars built with routers, planers, bandsaws, etc. rather than a luthier designed and built instruments. The intent was to be cheap, durable and replaceable through modular design. Frets wore down? Just get a new neck rather than refret- in under an hour your guitar is back in action for a couple hundred bucks.
Some other manufacturers sell for Squier prices, practically, but are better guitars than Fender's custom shop in terms of fit and finish. All three of these companies are floundering with the same problem of generating nearly identical model after model after model in a desperate bid to maintain a semblance of traction in the marketplace. The only thing that keeps Fender, Gibson and Martin alive is brand loyalty- it's a loyalty to the shadows of the past (Clapton's Blackie, Duane Allman's '59 Les Paul, Tony Rice and Norman Blake's Martins, etc.), but it's enough to continue to sell some guitars.
Since Fender can't compete effectively with their own past nor with marketplace competitors, the next step is trying to litigate their place in the market. That too will fail, especially if PRS, Yamaha, Thomann, Sire, etc., band together in mutual defense and class-action retaliatory litigation. The point was made about needing to defend trademarks or losing them is correct, as I understand it; if undefended, the trademark is considered abandoned. For the vulture capitalists who own Fender, the trademark and defining features (i.e., "intellectual property") are the only value the company really has- but that legal battle is already lost in the US under case law. European laws are different and are more advantageous to Fender in this strategy, but Fender will ultimately lose. They'll also try the same thing with the Tele, J bass and P bass, etc.
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What makes this frivolous imho is that they haven't enfored this copyright for going on 70 years. Think what you will of Dimarzio, but he found a spurious aspect of pickups that nobody had thought to monetize, and made it something in the marketplace. Fender seem to want the cattle to walk back into the barn after leaving the door open for generations
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Fender could do nothing until December last year, when the European Court of Justice made a ruling that said works of applied art are entitled to copyright protection. Fender then took its case against a Chinese copyist to the Düsseldorf Regional Court, which found the Stratocaster body to be a work of applied art. Originally Posted by Average Joe
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This is an interesting counter argument (watch from 6 mins 15 seconds).
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The Stratocaster body is the most common body shape ever made. I can go on the local marketplace and buy a cheap strat copy for under 50€. I bought a few so I could learn how to level and dress frets. They became perfectly useable strats, and one is really good (nice chunky neck).
All I can see happening is that these factories change their CNC routing template to something slightly different. Make the upper horn a little skinnier, the lower horn a little shorter. That's pretty much how it is with Gibson and Rickenbacker copies right now.
Fender is owned by some entity called Servco Pacific, that mainly invests in automotive companies but has been branching out into musical instrument companies. They've lawyered up and won the case in Dusseldorf because the other side (some random Chinese brand) didn't even show up to court. Now they're going after other smaller companies. It feels very corporate. At this point I prefer a non-Fender name on my strat.
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KDH talks of these guitars as if they were two-dimensional.
For more than seventy years, everyone has lauded the Stratocaster as an extraordinary design, and a thing of beauty. Now everyone with a YouTube channel is claiming the Strat is unexceptional.
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Maybe it’s a generational thing. When you grow up in a world of cheap Strat copies it probably no longer seems iconic but simply ubiquitous.
But yes it absolutely a masterpiece of 20th century design. Much more so than any of the Gibson designs (and I say this as a Gibson player who doesn’t play strats.)
Honestly, I find it kind of crazy that the design is not protected under trademark law. But that ship has sailed. This copyright business seems a bit dodgy, but I lack the legal knowledge to assess it.
Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk
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Great Reason to play other guitars,Lol! For me in 1990 I saw Jeff Beck and SRV on the same bill. I realized that they owned that guitar,and the bar was as high as it it could go!
So I moved on to various Teles,Lol!
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Oy. The used and new markets are overloaded with guitars.
Fender’s action here is irrelevant in any direction. Let ‘em do what they think will help them.
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If you saw Danny Gatton play, you would have felt that the Telecaster bar was quite high as well. Originally Posted by jads57
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…and Roy Buchanan.
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From what I’ve read about the Strat’s origins, I doubt the artwork argument would hold up under a genuine adversarial case. The Strat was intended as a collection of functional improvements over the telecaster, not as a work of art, and as KDH notes, the features they a cite as evidence of its artistry are common to many guitars that preceded it. Arguing it’s art for that reason is like arguing a book is because it’s made up of pages. Also, the statement that Leo designed the strat is open to challenge — many people had a hand in it, and the strat itself is a modification of the P-bass. There are reasons a copyright claim has never worked in the US. My guess is that Fender is now trying to leverage their luck in the decision in Germany for licensing fees. [with caveat that I don’t actually know what I’m talking about, but this is the internet]
Last edited by John A.; 05-20-2026 at 12:42 PM.
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I did as well as Roy Buchanon,and a few others. The Strat tonality is so over saturated in modern music for me.
And I get it fits in the mix nicely!
The Tele has more aggression and cuts like hot knife,Lol!
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Actually they became a mega corp, larger than ever, after Leo Fender sold it for $13 million. He just was responsible for their most iconic guitars that the mega corp used as a springboard to global dominance in conjunction with cost cutting and insane marketing campaigns that are still ongoing. I see their attempt to assert authority over the designs as business as usual and let's be honest, it won't amount to a hill of beans the same way Larry Dimarzio trying to own a pickup color didn't. It's just another stupid internet outrage that will evaporate by late next week and be forgotten. Originally Posted by Cunamara
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They could have pursued that copyright any year since 1954. To wait until the design has become generic to an industry seem to me to be bad Faith. Originally Posted by Litterick
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In Anglo-American law (or more precisely Equity) there is the concept of laches, which seems like a pretty good defense to Fender's claims. Originally Posted by Average Joe
Laches (equity) - Wikipedia
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If they get monopoly on the strat design and only Fender can sell a strat...would you buy anything Fender? I'm not that invested in Strats anymore but I wouldnt buy anything fender....the greed they have is too much. Make a better guitar instead of spending money in this,
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I haven't bought anything tied to Fender in over 25 years but if the guitar "community" is gonna get all self righteous about this I'm gonna go buy a telecaster to modify just to piss people off, LOL. Originally Posted by johaneugen
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When you go to a guitar show, all you see is Strat and Tele clones, with an occasional 335 thrown in. Iconic shapes, for sure, but why were they not registered/protected eons ago? And would that have worked? The famous mid-´70s lawsuit case by Gibson against Japanese copiers mainly resulted in different headstock designs. If IKEA were into musical instruments, a chipboard Stratå would have been their take.
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But Germany has a civil law system, as do most European countries. Judges do not consider the maxims of equity in their reasoning. Originally Posted by Stringswinger
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Obtaining copyright or trademark protection was difficult and expensive in the USA in the 1950s. Copyright applied to works of fine art, but not applied arts. Trademarks were logos and other devices that obviously proclaimed identity. The shapes of things were not considered to be significant (the Coca-Cola bottle has been in use since 1916, but was only trademarked in 1960). Originally Posted by Gitterbug
The Jazzmaster and Jaguar are protected by US Patent 2,960,900, which says the body design improves comfort while playing seated.
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