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Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

guitarworld.com

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Re: Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

#61

Post by myself248 »

coldpie wrote: post #50
myself248 wrote: post #47

Okay, none of the guitars on that page look like an "S" to me. What am I missing, and what are they protecting?

Sorry if I'm explaining the joke, but the term comes from Fender's guitars called Stratocasters. It's a popular guitar shape & configuration, so very many companies have made their own versions of it. However, Stratocaster is a trademark of Fender, so companies don't like to use that name to describe their products, to try to avoid Fender's lawsuits. So the industry has used the term "S-type" or "S-style" to refer to…

Thank you, yes, that's exactly the detail I was missing! It's a euphemism for a word that starts with an S, not at all related to the typographical form of the letter S.

Alright, my Trogdor-shaped guitar might happen after all...

Re: Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

#63

Post by nikanj »

ricardobayes wrote: post #51
scrumper wrote: post #33

Since 2020 Fender has been owned by Servco Pacific, a Hawaiian car dealer that has some musical instrument holdings as well (Roland). It has a private equity arm attached from which presumably this idea came. I wonder if someone up high in Honolulu has decided it's time to start the value extraction phase or prepare for a sale. It doesn't make much sense otherwise: this is a very brand destructive move in a market th…

Not a lawyer and I don't have any insights to this, but I wouldn't speculate based off this - trademark holders kind of "have to" pursue each violation, because otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.

Yes. However, they are not suing based on a trademark, they are suing based on having copyright on the shape of the body.

Re: Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

#64

Post by plasticsoprano »

spamizbad wrote: post #59

If you're not guitar gear nerd, you might be unaware: Fender doesn't make the best version of its various guitar shapes (with one debatable exception)[1]. If you want an off-the-rack "S-Style" guitar (Stratocaster) there's a handful of premium, smaller brands that will make an objectively better guitar than any of Fender's offerings, including their premium "Ultra" series: Suhr, Anderson Guitarworks, James Tyler Guit…

So why not license the shape then? They could do a royalty with those deemed of quality and deny a license to those that are of lower quality and then sue them if they don't use the design. This would allow them to manage quality with lower reputational harm.

Re: Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

#65

Post by nikanj »

rwmj wrote: post #21

Can someone explain what the actual legal basis for this is? The shape of the guitar is very old (75+ years) and has been extensively copied before, so one would assume that patents and trademarks would not cover it.

Patents and trademarks would not cover it, but fortunately this case was about copyright.

Re: Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

#66

Post by skywhopper »

ricardobayes wrote: post #51
scrumper wrote: post #33

Since 2020 Fender has been owned by Servco Pacific, a Hawaiian car dealer that has some musical instrument holdings as well (Roland). It has a private equity arm attached from which presumably this idea came. I wonder if someone up high in Honolulu has decided it's time to start the value extraction phase or prepare for a sale. It doesn't make much sense otherwise: this is a very brand destructive move in a market th…

Not a lawyer and I don't have any insights to this, but I wouldn't speculate based off this - trademark holders kind of "have to" pursue each violation, because otherwise they carry the risk of the trademark becoming too widely used/generic so it would become meaningless.

This isn’t a trademark case.

Re: Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

#68

Post by Hamuko »

snide wrote: post #31
piltdownman wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In terms of ergonomics, resonance and so on, there's not many terribly optimal solidbody electronic guitar shapes that deviate from the Les Paul/Strat/Tele trinity. Explorers, Flying Vs and the like are basically genre-oddities for aesthetics. Guitars are not about aesthetics, otherwise Fender wouldn't have marques like Squier or ranges like Highway One to differentiate their low-quality tiers.

> Guitars are not about aesthetics My wife used to work at Acoustic Guitar magazine. She said the most common sales line to sell a guitar at Guitar Center was "it looks good on you". The sound of guitars might not be aesthetics, but in regards to sales, it most certainly is. Everyone plays the same guitars because they grew up seeing their idols play those guitars.

Yeah, I'd say guitars are heavily based on aesthetics, but not entirely. One of the reasons why I switched from a Les Paul, which was the guitar shape I loved the most before I started playing, to a Stratocaster was that the Stratocaster was just that much more comfortable. The LP body is basically just a block of wood with a cutout for your hand in comparison to the contoured body of the Stratocaster. If I had to buy an LP-style guitar again, I'd want at least a belly cut on it.

Re: Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars

#69

Post by rhplus »

plasticsoprano wrote: post #64
spamizbad wrote: post #59

If you're not guitar gear nerd, you might be unaware: Fender doesn't make the best version of its various guitar shapes (with one debatable exception)[1]. If you want an off-the-rack "S-Style" guitar (Stratocaster) there's a handful of premium, smaller brands that will make an objectively better guitar than any of Fender's offerings, including their premium "Ultra" series: Suhr, Anderson Guitarworks, James Tyler Guit…

So why not license the shape then? They could do a royalty with those deemed of quality and deny a license to those that are of lower quality and then sue them if they don't use the design. This would allow them to manage quality with lower reputational harm.

> So why not license the shape then?

Because - until it makes its way through the courts - it’s not established that Fender has the rights to claim ownership of on the shape in the first place.

In the US, there’s three routes for that - design patent, trade dress and artistic copyright. AFAIK they don’t have a design patent. Trade dress is hard to prove association - would most people on the street say “yep, that’s 100% a Stratocaster” if they say the outline? Probably not. The shape isn’t separate from the functionality so artistic copyright hasn’t upheld either. The fact that Fender has not successfully enforced copyright concerns for over 70 years is also a sign that they never had IP protection on the shape.

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