81–90 of 137 posts
on the one hand this sucks on the other hand let a thousand schools of steinberger/strandberg-style weirdness bloom
I think Fender are idiots for doing this but I also wonder why companies copy the body style so slavishly. You would think makers of musical instruments would be a little more creative themselves.
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I suspect because the Chinese firm in question was a fabrication of FMIC for exactly this purpose.
There are a lot of real Chinese firms (factories) that make unapproved copies including body shape, headstock shape, logo, and brand name.
Unpopular opinion: I struggle to get angry at this. These are clearly rip-offs of the Stratocaster design. Sure, Fender makes crappy guitars nowadays and has mostly ruined their brand. Go make a new design. Let Fender die. Cases like this are exactly what copyright law is made for, and its a judicious and good application of it. I'm not going to feel sorry for these shops because they're small mom & pop shops when I…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 1…
It's possible there's a US copyright claim, but on a 1954 design, you would have to have registered it, marked the works with the copyright (on at least most of the copies), and timely renewed. There's also, IMHO, a solid question of if US copyright applies to the shape of a guitar. If they had a strong case, I think they would have tried to enforce on it in 2009 when they tried to enforce on trademark.
[1] https://www.musicradar.com/news/guitars/fender-loses-guitar-...
Fender doesn’t even make the best strat and so overpriced, but I guess it’s subjective.
The body has literally 0 effect on the sound of an electric guitar. Only the pickups matter. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n02tImce3AE
Other things one might care about:
- Ergonomics: weight, balance, shape of the neck & body, finishes all affect the feel of playing the guitar
- Build quality: Reliability, stability of the wood, ease of setup
- Durability: Quality of finishes, quality of assembly
- Aesthetics
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I think Fender are idiots for doing this but I also wonder why companies copy the body style so slavishly. You would think makers of musical instruments would be a little more creative themselves.
It's a pretty restrictive design space. The Stratocaster shape is based on the centuries-old shape of acoustic guitars. The lower dip of the "hip" of the guitar shape serves a practical purpose, in allowing it to rest on your leg when playing seated. The upper dip mirrors the lower hip aesthetically and removes weight. The cutaways in the upper bout allows you to access the higher frets. At that point there's not a w…
As with most things guitar, it's mostly about what works for the individual player.
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.
in Germany, Fender recently won a default ruling because a chinese counterfeiter didn't even show up in court, and they're now using that to go after anyone selling in the EU, even though that's not really what that case win means. But private equity is going to private equity.
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Maybe someone new to music and guitar would mistake them for the real thing, but these copies have different hand styles and they have neither the Stratocaster nor the fender logo. This is a non-issue. The actual problem lies within fender itself. Not only it's aggressively protecting a old design, fender itself is guilty of being misleading when it splits its product line into multiple brands that's often confusing…
The problem is some PE has read up on the FujiGen Gakki guitars of the 70s and thought they could strike rich with a test case in a soft German court - and they were right.
> According to Fender, the outcome of the case – launched against a Chinese manufacturer – gave the firm the legal right to “protect its designs in global commerce”. So they used China scare as a trojan horse to sue other US manufacturers? There's some delicious irony in that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think Fender are idiots for doing this but I also wonder why companies copy the body style so slavishly. You would think makers of musical instruments would be a little more creative themselves.
It's a pretty restrictive design space. The Stratocaster shape is based on the centuries-old shape of acoustic guitars. The lower dip of the "hip" of the guitar shape serves a practical purpose, in allowing it to rest on your leg when playing seated. The upper dip mirrors the lower hip aesthetically and removes weight. The cutaways in the upper bout allows you to access the higher frets. At that point there's not a w…