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Thomann takes legal action against Fender

thomann.de

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Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#131

Post by d1sxeyes »

sparkling wrote: post #127
d1sxeyes wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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?

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#132

Post by ben7799 »

dofm wrote: post #126
d1sxeyes wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 car…

This is incredibly hard to believe, Fender is many times bigger than PRS.

Fender sells at least 10x more guitars than PRS.

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#133

Post by ben7799 »

codedokode wrote: post #51

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.

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.

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#134

Post by ben7799 »

Aboutplants wrote: post #53
ben7799 wrote: post #33

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…

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.

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#135

Post by ben7799 »

levicole wrote: post #78
ben7799 wrote: post #33

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…

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.

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#136

Post by dkuntz2 »

vintermann wrote: post #7

Apparently Fender got bought up by a private equity fund, Servco Pacific Capital. Who would have guessed.

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

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#137

Post by dkuntz2 »

matchagaucho wrote: post #54
normaler wrote: post #21

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 ind…

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

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#138

Post by dkuntz2 »

matchagaucho wrote: post #115
dofm wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#139

Post by dkuntz2 »

dofm wrote: post #72
valdiorn wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Everything Fender's CEO said in that meeting was a lie to appease retailers

Re: Thomann takes legal action against Fender

#140

Post by dkuntz2 »

codedokode wrote: post #48
wavesplash wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I think I watched that video but sadly there is no sound comparison to demonstrate the quality issues.

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

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