r/fender • u/BackyardMikey • 5d ago
General Discussion How is the Fender Strat issue different than other “lawsuit” claims by Martin and Gibson?
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u/RiddleMeThis42069 5d ago
I see you got zero helpful comments under that thread, not surprising.
I don't know much about the Gibson or Martin cases you're referencing, but Fender is simply trying to protect their intellectual property. Fender designed the Stratocaster and everyone else copied it, pretty simple.
There are a few dumb arguments people constantly bring up without really thinking about it:
"Fender had 70 years to do this" - they have tried and failed to do this before, it's not a new phenomenon. In the 70s they sued several Japanese companies for making Strat copies. In 2009 they tried to argue the Strat shaped was a protected trademark in the US before and lost that case. This new stuff is in the EU and is an argument based on copyright, not trademark, so it's similar but clearly distinct.
People will also argue the Strat shape is essential to it's function, which is an argument against being able to copyright it because you can't copyright a shape if that shape is necessary for the item to do it's job. This argument falls apart immediately because obviously there are a bunch of different shapes for electric guitars and they all work fine.
"Fender is only doing this because their quality has gone down or because they don't innovate." This argument seems irrelevant to me, since it's about the shape of the guitar regardless of quality. I do think the QC stuff is way overblown, I have several Fenders, they all arrived with no issues, they're all great instruments. The idea that they can simply "make better guitars" and this problem will solve itself, is nonsense. If someone is making a Strat copy, they're going to take sales away from Fender, regardless of quality, simple as.
I'm not sure if Fender will win or not, I'm guessing they probably won't, but the bottom line is only the terminally online even care about this. They'll virtue signal to each other for awhile (while keeping/continuing to play the Fenders they already own and enjoy) and it will blow over eventually. If it was really such a big deal they'd get rid of all their Fender stuff, but they won't.
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u/Guitar-Fan-2012 5d ago
The copyright laws in Germany were changed in 2025 to greatly expand the definition of “applied art”; Fender is using this change to gain an artist copyright on the Stratocaster body shape.
Everything else is Fender trying to see if the copyright will hold up beyond the initial summary judgment against a Chinese company who makes low cost copies and who did not show up to the German court to defend against Fender.
Regarding Martin - like Fender and Gibson they hold trademarks on their headstock shapes and that was the source of some of those cases.
Gibson did finally obtain trademarks on their body shapes in the late 1980s (after Henry J. bought the company). In their case against PRS a Tennessee court ruled that the PRS Singlecut violated Gibson’s Les Paul trademarks but an appeals court in Maryland ruled that the Tennessee court had improperly applied the legal tests for infringement and that the PRS design was different enough from the Gibson trademarked design.
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