Thomann takes legal action against Fender

https://www.thomann.de/blog/en/inside/thomann-takes-legal-action-against-fender/

by Audiophilip • 29 days ago

203 140 29 days ago

kgwxd• 1 month ago

Good luck, but they've already destroyed the name, all they have left to make money is IP, pretty sure they're only focused on this.

nosioptar• 1 month ago

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.

sparkling2• 29 days ago

502 Bad Gateway, the HN kiss of death

Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260624025836/https://www.thoma...

eqvinox2• 29 days ago

Works fine here…

kulahan• 29 days ago

Dead for me, as is the archive link.

altairprime• 29 days ago

https://web.archive.org/web/20260624025836/https://www.thoma...

jorisw• 29 days ago

Those who don’t know what this is about may appreciate Rick Beato’s (a guitar music vlogger) rant about it

https://youtube.com/watch?v=OU7RUpkXsV0

pimeys• 29 days ago

And if somebody here doesn't follow his channel, he is the guy who does easily the best music interviews on YouTube.

nl• 28 days ago

I think this makes some excellent points.

In particular the cultural impact of the S-shape guitar has been enhanced by people playing non-Fender S-shapes.

Think Eddie van Halen on his Frankenstrat which has it's own Wikipedia entry and has been displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was probably a Charvel body.

That goes to the heart of the "work of applied art" argument.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein_(guitar)

jpfromlondon• 27 days ago

Fender own Charvel so that's okay.

vintermann• 29 days ago

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

al_borland• 29 days ago

Apparently this started back in 1985.

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

leoc• 29 days ago

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.

queenkjuul4• 28 days ago

Schulz and co were a big step up from CBS, genuinely. Schulz was associated with the original company, not a random PE firm.

It's the 2000-2020 exchanges that were detrimental

jwitthuhn• 29 days ago

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.

alexjplant• 29 days ago

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.

lenerdenator• 29 days ago

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.

brandall10• 29 days ago

Masterbuilts are closer to $10k now, fwiw. Plenty of shop built CS hover around $5k or more.

dieselgate• 29 days ago

Fender? I barely knew 'er.

I play a Gretsch... which interestingly is actually "controlled" by Fender after looking it up; still owned by the Gretsch family

sillysaurusx• 29 days ago

My ex and her bf have been doing this thing where they match any word. For example, "Cardio? I hardly startio." You can do this too now. You’re welcome.

(It’s surprisingly hard to think of a motivating example.)

dkuntz25• 28 days ago

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

okanat• 29 days ago

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.

worik• 29 days ago

I am confused. What is this about?

dofm20• 29 days ago

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.

eigenspace2• 29 days ago

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?

lompad• 29 days ago

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.

_def• 29 days ago

aliexpress? Thomann themselves are big in manufacturing guitars in china.

lokar• 28 days ago

For (1), not a fender style, a straight up counterfeit

wander_homer• 29 days ago

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.

dofm20• 29 days ago

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.

borlox• 29 days ago

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.

d1sxeyes2• 28 days ago

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.

dofm20• 28 days ago

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 carries himself, and tell me that a big part of this isn't injured pride that John Mayer went to PRS.

I think if this was really about the cheap body guitars — a nearly zero-margin market for decades — they wouldn't have sent a C&D to LsL or PRS, because that was always going to invite trouble.

Harley Benton is a problem at some small level and I am sure Fender will suggest it is, but Fender have had a "buy the real thing" type of marketing campaign for both Fender and Squier since the 90s at least.

The 2009 lawsuit made this clear; it detailed all Fender's "buy original" marketing campaigns as a way of pointing out that Fender has never policed the right to make the S-type body shape.

Squier competes pretty adequately with Harley Benton and all the other cheap brands; at that price, being "Fender's budget brand" has prudence associated with it.

What has changed is that Fender are losing out at the top end to high-end luthiers who give a shit, and PRS. And now they know exactly how badly. This lawsuit will feature a lot of data from reverb.com, I suspect.

sparkling2• 28 days ago

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.

Animats3• 29 days ago

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.

codedokode11• 29 days ago

But technically the guitar does not have to have a shape of a strat. It could be any other shape, why not be creative and make your own design?

frankfrank13• 29 days ago

Because strats sell. Oddly shaped guitars don't, or at least not for a long time, and would never break into the top 10 best selling guitar shapes.

dofm20• 29 days ago

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.

jdietrich• 29 days ago

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.

https://strandbergguitars.com/en-GB/product/boden-essential-...

adammarples• 29 days ago

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."

dwroberts• 29 days ago

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.

bluGill2• 29 days ago

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.

Animats3• 29 days ago

That article, and LLMs, seem to pick up on an article from US Legal Forms.[1] That article itself reads like something written by an LLM.

A more serious review of the works of applied art problem comes from the Columbia Journal of Law and the Arts.[2] That article ends with "Thus, the 'separability' line Congress has drawn, albeit often difficult to discern coherently, places most overall designs of useful articles in the public domain." Separability means being able to take the decorative design off the useful object. This covers logos on T-shirts, for example. A T-shirt with no logo still works as a T-shirt. But if you can't take the decorative part off the functional object, it's not separable. The common squiggle-shaped bicycle rack is an excellent example. That won design awards and is admired, but it's not copyrightable - you can't take the squiggle off the bike rack and still have the bike rack.[3]

The Fender Stratocaster hits that limit - take away the Strat form, and there's no guitar there.

[1] https://legal-resources.uslegalforms.com/a/applied-art-doctr...

[2] https://journals.library.columbia.edu/index.php/lawandarts/a...

[3] Brandir Int’l, Inc. v. Cascade Pac.Lumber Co https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/F2/834...

normaler• 29 days ago

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).

matchagaucho3• 29 days ago

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?

mc32• 29 days ago

Things become generic if you stop defending them/enforcing your IP.

I think the iPhone at one time defended the design of its “squircle” corners. Eventually settling out of court.

queenkjuul4• 28 days ago

Leo himself did not copyright the design and himself sold "clones" after selling the Fender brand

It's never belonged to Fender Corp

dkuntz25• 28 days ago

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

omnimus2• 29 days ago

Yeah sure biggest european music ecommerce store runs on tower server in a back office.

Brian_K_White2• 28 days ago

Happens all the time.

ben77995• 29 days ago

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.

Aboutplants• 29 days ago

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.

ben77995• 28 days ago

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.

grayhatter• 29 days ago

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.

nemomarx2• 29 days ago

the shape is in the public domain though? it would be like trying to patent a rounded rectangle, it's inherently silly

levicole• 29 days ago

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).

ben77995• 28 days ago

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.

codedokode11• 29 days ago

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.

sampo• 29 days ago

You can probably

No need for "probably". That absolutely works.

Rendello• 29 days ago

"Who says you need to buy a guitar?"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r_F7aiOvdwE

(technically a "diddley bow": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diddley_bow)

vitally36432• 29 days ago

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.

wink• 27 days ago

Mini USB was clunky, but how was it flawed? Unless you count data transfer rates as physical. Never seen one break.

nemomarx2• 29 days ago

why would the connector need to change? nothing has come out that's really better for analog signals

zokier• 29 days ago

xlr?

vitally36432• 29 days ago

I do find it hilarious that the phono jack appeared fully formed and hasn't changed in a hundred years. We got the smaller flavors of TRS sure, but the big honking quarter inch phono jack has stayed exactly the same. Perfect design in one go, no notes.

jcarrano• 27 days ago

If signals were based on low impedance current loops as opposed to voltage-based like they are today, interference could be much reduced. This would break phantom power, so power to preamps would have to be send through another set of conductors, which would make the design of the electronics easier as well as safer.

Of course, none of this will ever happen.

BigTTYGothGF2• 29 days ago

Consider: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stradivarius

analog31• 29 days ago

As an amusing aside, Stradivarius could not have known how his fiddles would sound today. Most of them have been modernized, with new necks and bass bar, and some other tweaks. Most are played with metal or synthetic strings, and modern bows.

quickthrowman• 29 days ago

Sometimes engineers find the optimal or near optimal design early on in the life of a technology. Jet airplanes haven’t changed much since the 1960s.

HardwareLust• 29 days ago

Oh yeah, you can plug a guitar made in the 50's to an amp that was made yesterday and vice versa with zero issues.

ben77995• 28 days ago

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.

dang• 29 days ago

Recent and related:

Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189539 - May 2026 (132 comments)

TrackerFF• 29 days ago

The problem is that after their original patent expired, they sat on their hands for too long. By the time they tried to trademark in 2008/2009, their bodies were considered generic in the US. Gibson, on the other hand, did what Fender should have done and applied for trademark (for their Les Paul body) back in the late 80s.

Now other brands are eating their lunch, and Fender is seemingly trying a last hail marry to get this settled. My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts.

vondur2• 29 days ago

"My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts." That's exactly what they have done, they sued a Chinese company that was making knock-off Strat copies and selling them in Germany. Fender sued them, the Chinese company was a no show and Fender took that as a win to go after PRS who is selling a John Mayer Strat style guitar.

lambdaone• 28 days ago

A win that, as I understand it, did not actually set a precedent and is thus of no actual legal use to them.

28304283409234• 29 days ago

This makes me want to buy a new PRS. At Thomann.

qwery• 29 days ago

Even if you think Fender is solely responsible for the design, which is frankly ridiculous, the bloody thing's been around forever and now they're suing?

Having a court stop actual counterfeits -- sure, nobody has a problem with that. That's not what this is.

Then there was the headstock thing, Fender was notorious for pursuing makers of guitars with headstocks that had any resemblance to the Strat headstock. Let's ignore how limited the design space is considering the constraints of six strings - six tuners at the end of a narrow strip of timber. Fender was obviously acting in an anti-competitive way at that point. At the same time, the quality of their own products continued to drop. Coincidence?

Now they are going after anything that looks like an electric guitar.

The general "S-style" body form, as popularised/iconified by the Stratocaster is popular for many reasons. A lot of those reasons (I would say most) are practical/functional.

Fender shouldn't be allowed to possess the shape, let alone use it as an anti-competitive weapon in order to coast along for another century just because the brand happens to come with some notable IP.

Fender's monopoly over the shape shouldn't be protected by law/courts. Here's why:

It's a functional design -- a matter of ergonomics and practicality. For a lot of guitarists, the S body style is the most effective, comfortable shape to play.

For a concrete example of an "iconic", yet clearly functional design feature: the top point of the "S" is where the front strap hook is. Having this point protrude forwards (along the neck) helps balance the weight and this provides the player with physical control over the mass of the guitar.

Many of the subtle features of Stratocaster body are obvious practical improvements -- it's the result of filing down sharp edges that were noticed when attempting the play the instrument. Imagine you're starting from a classical acoustic design, what steps would you take to make it more playable and make it electric at the same time?

It's an incremental design built on forms that have been used by luthiers for centuries. It's not a Fender shape -- it's an (electric) guitar shape.

hettygreen• 29 days ago

F*ck em - let them have that body shape. Seriously at this point do we need more stratocaster shaped guitars?

There's so many cool companies doing unique body shapes, if you're gonna take the time to build a guitar why not put some thought into the design?

karim79• 29 days ago

I have two strats. Both signature editions. Ed O'Brien and Mark Speer edition. I also have a fender accoustic which is perhaps my most favouritist guitar ever. I fucking love fender and will forever.

insaneirish• 28 days ago

In one fell swoop, Fender destroyed every bit of musician goodwill they had. For right or for wrong (and I think for wrong), their claims are baseless.

I wish them (and their PE overlords) a powerful defeat, ideally in a court of law, but if not, in the court of public opinion.

queenkjuul4• 28 days ago

This one really bothers me:

Leo Fender himself declined to copyright the Strat body

Leo Fender himself sold "Strat clones" of the exact variety Fender Corp is trying to ban, after the sold the Fender name. I own one.

So Fender Corp is trying to retroactively assert that Leo Fender stole his own design from Fender Corp in 1979, they didn't have any issue for 47 years, but now because a Chinese company didn't show up in German court, they have eternal license to the design Leo Fender explicitly chose not to sell them.

Fuck Fender. My Jazz Bass is still my favorite instrument, I've had it 20 years and played hundreds of gigs, but I guess I'm never buying another

Thomann takes legal action against Fender

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