#CoffeeAndKlon is my (irregular!) Sunday morning magazine series, where I talk about whatever’s on my mind right now. There’s always coffee, and there’s normally chat about the Klon and its many competitors.
You may be aware that a significant section of the guitar-playing community is currently very unhappy [understatement of the year – Ed] with Fender’s recent actions over the Stratocaster body shape.
Let’s discuss it.
Table of Contents
- What Has Fender Done?
- Why Are Fender’s Actions Causing Upset?
- How Do I Feel About All This?
- Research Notes
- Final Thoughts
What Has Fender Done?
The long and short of it is that Fender appears to be trying to retrospectively claim intellectual property rights over the Stratocaster body shape.
How It Started: The European Court Case
According to this press release, legal firm Bird & Bird won a court case in Germany on behalf of Fender – and, on the back of that, they are claiming that Fender now has “legal protection for the iconic Stratocaster guitar body design under German and European Union copyright law”.
Here’s Fender’s own press release, published March 9th 2026. I’ve reproduced a few of the key passages below:
- “The decision creates enforceable rights against any guitars using the Stratocaster body shape that are manufactured, sold or distributed into Germany or other countries of the European Union (EU) – regardless of where those guitars are produced – reinforcing Fender’s ability to protect its designs in global commerce.”
- “For musicians, the ruling helps protect the authenticity and quality standards associated with Fender instruments, reducing confusion between genuine products and imitations while supporting the long-term value and collectability of original Fender guitars.”
- “This decision reinforces the value of originality and ensures that the authenticity players associate with Fender continues for generations to come.”
How It Continued: At Least One Cease & Desist Letter To A US-Based Guitar Manufacturer
At the time of writing (24th May 2026), Fender hasn’t published any press releases confirming that they’ve started enforcement proceedings against any other guitar manufacturers.
Guitar World has reported that Fender has sent a cease and desist letter to US guitar manufacturer LSL Instruments. According to their reporting:
- LSL Instruments was sent a cease and desist letter by Bird & Bird, acting on behalf of Fender.
- The letter demands that LSL Instruments “immediately stop manufacturing, selling, marketing, or producing such infringing products”.
- The letter also demands that LSL Instruments recalls all guitars sold in the EU, and destroy them. (Presumably, this demand only covers the “infringing products”, but that isn’t made clear in the reporting.)
I’ve seen lots of YouTube channels claiming that Fender has sent similar letters to other manufacturers, but I haven’t been able to corroborate that myself.
LSL Instruments has set up a GoFundMe page to raise the funds necessary to fight Fender. (Full disclosure: I’ve donated to LSL’s GoFundMe campaign.)
It’s fair to say that Fender’s actions haven’t gone down well with the guitar community on YouTube.
Why Are Fender’s Actions Causing Upset?
There seems to be two strands to this:
- This ship sailed literally decades ago.
- Folks feel that Fender’s quality will drop even further without adequate competition.
This Ship Sailed Literally Decades Ago
Back in 2009, Fender failed in their application for USA intellectual property rights over the Stratocaster, Telecaster and Precision bass body shapes. The full judgement is well worth a read.
The ruling does a great job of setting out the core requirements for establishing intellectual property rights in this case:
- “Distinctiveness is acquired by ‘substantially exclusive and continuous use’ of the mark in commerce.”
- [Fender] “must show that the primary significance of the product configuration in the minds of consumers is not the product but the source of that product in order to establish acquired distinctiveness.” and “the burden is particularly heavy when that use has not been exclusive.”
- “In the context of product design, genericness may be found where the design is, at a minimum, so common in the industry that it cannot be said to identify a particular source.”
Which is why it’s no surprise that the key ruling is:
“The record shows that, at least from the mid-1970s, consumers in the United States have been exposed to guitars in the [Stratocaster], [Telecaster] and [Precision] shapes emanating from third parties.
“Opposers have presented unrebutted testimony that they have offered for sale identical and substantially similar guitars in the United States and have seen identical or substantially similar guitars offered in the United States 18 Opposition Nos. 91161403 et al. by parties other than applicant since at least the 1970s.”
The ruling is underpinned by a wealth of corroborating testimony … along with Fender’s own actions:
“… the record establishes is that [Fender], starting from the beginning in the 1950s, never claimed the body configurations as trademarks in any advertising or required third parties to do so until 2003, the year it filed its applications”.
“The record” in question there includes Fender’s own publications, which (according to the ruling) clearly show that Fender themselves only claimed the instrument names as trademarks until 2003.
It also includes adverts that Fender ran in 1981, 1986 and 1988 which “shows a company recognizing that others make this shape and distinguishing its guitar from others by its name – there’s “only one Fender.”
The rest of the ruling continues in a similar vein.
In short: in the USA, the three instrument body shapes (Stratocaster, Telecaster and Precision) have acquired “generic” status. They’re not “distinctive”.
Now, it’s important to note that this is only a ruling affecting the USA market. And it’s a rejected trademark application. Whereas Fender are trying to enforce copyright ownership in the European Union, claiming that the Stratocaster body is an artistic work.
It’s also worth noting that Fender didn’t win a contested court case: they won a default judgement in Germany because the other party didn’t show up. Commentators dispute whether or not that judgement automatically applies to other firms, and the European Union’s own website states that “With few exceptions copyright is not covered by EU law.” (ie, a judgement in Germany doesn’t automatically apply outside of Germany).
Competition For Fender Is In The Public Interest
I was surprised to see the guitar community suddenly turn on Fender’s quality control. I thought it was only trendy to bash Gibson’s QC?
My own experience with quality from the big brands does not match with what I routinely read on guitar forums and in Facebook groups, so you’ll have to forgive me if I’m skeptical about some of the things folks have said about Fender’s QC since the backlash started. Especially as I didn’t see these things being said before the backlash started.
Reading between the lines, I think the guitar community is really talking about the large number of guitar ranges that Fender has introduced, and the guitar community’s perception that Fender is overcharging for what they offer. So not so much about quality, but more about expectations for the asking price.
Where does competition come into this?
I think the community’s concern here is that, without competition to keep them honest, Fender will charge even more for their current products. (When it comes to being illegally anti-competitive, Fender has recent prior form.)
The general feeling is that alternatives (like LSL Instruments) exist because they’re better quality products for the money.
I can understand that sentiment. It matches my own experiences.
I’ve previously written about how Fender’s price rises have massively exceeded inflation. Oh, and here too. I don’t personally see how Fender can get way with eye-watering price increases if competition really is affecting its bottom line.
I don’t play a Fender Stratocaster; I play a PRS Silver Sky. Why? I think it’s a better product. It delivers the Stratocaster sound that I couldn’t find in any of the Fender Stratocasters that I’ve owned or tried.
If Fender aren’t going to make the guitar that I’m after when the market is forcing them to compete, what incentive will they have to do that if they’re successful in monopolising Strat-style guitars in the future?
How Do I Feel About All This?
Before I talk about Fender, I think it’s helpful to set out my personal position on intellectual property rights.
Folks Have A Right To Protect Their Intellectual Property …
I’m a firm believer in appropriate intellectual property rights. And I will happily die on the hill that a right is only a right if you can enforce it.
Rights must apply to everyone, regardless of how we may feel about the person or corporation. If you start picking and choosing who has rights and who does not, history repeatedly shows us how quickly that brings out the absolute worst of humanity.
… As Long As They Actually Own Those Rights
If, through your own deliberate actions, you have given up those intellectual property rights, then you have also given up the right to protect that intellectual property. It’s not yours any more.
By extension, I’m firmly against using threats and power imbalances to bully rival companies, especially when you don’t actually own the intellectual property rights in the first place. (See this GOV.UK explainer about the practice.)
Unfortunately, this is the real world, and these kinds of practices appear to be quite normalised. And that’ll continue to be the case until the bullies and their legal representatives face meaningful sanctions for their actions.
Intellectual Property Rights Need Modernising
I’m also a firm believer that today’s intellectual property rights and their selective enforcement are unfair, and are not fit for the modern world.
There’s three issues for me:
- what you can / cannot claim intellectual property rights for,
- how governments and the courts will happily turn a blind eye to some rights infringement (ie what AI companies have done) but not others,
- it takes too long for intellectual property rights to expire.
Intellectual property rights should allow the inventor to benefit from the commercial exploitation of a genuine invention or original work of art. And these definitions should be consistent across the various types of intellectual property (patents, trademarks and copyrights).
They should especially act as a sufficient deterrent to prevent larger companies using their money to get away with infringing on the rights of smaller inventors and artists.
There should be genuine jeopardy for abuses of the system, especially where there is an imbalance between the parties involved. Where intent can be established, I’d love to see that reclassified as criminal theft, with criminal sanctions for both the company and the company officers involved.
And no-one – large or small – should be dining out on an invention or creation forever. For the good of society, intellectual property should revert to the public domain within a reasonable time frame, for free use by all.
The inventors’ descendants (and especially their descendants!) shouldn’t be living off of something they didn’t invent, long after the inventor themselves have passed. Go and invent something new!
Alas, that’s not the world we currently live in. But I wish it was.
Yes, But How Do You Feel About Fender’s Actions Here?
I oppose Fender’s actions here. Here’s my opinion on why.
If Fender was taking action against counterfeit goods, I’d be okay with that. But I haven’t seen any evidence that this is what’s happening here.
The Stratocaster body shape has been de facto public domain for fifty years. Through their own actions, Fender gave up any intellectual property rights that they may have originally owned.
As a result, I don’t agree with folks who are posting comments on forums and YouTube videos that Fender has the right to enforce their intellectual property. It is established fact that Fender never tried to claim that the Stratocaster body shape is their intellectual property until 2003.
It’s bad for society that a new management team at Fender is trying to retrospectively undo that. It does not serve the public interest for rights to be reclaimed after fifty years of de facto public domain usage. This isn’t a new team trying to correct an honest mistake by the last management team.
(The new Fender CEO was part of the last management team. Oh, and he probably wasn’t even born when the Stratocaster body shape became de facto public domain property.)
It also stinks that Fender is trying to use a judgement-by-default in this way.
What About The Requirement To Recall And Destroy All Offending Guitars?
I’m going to write that off as probably being one of the norms when attempting to enforce intellectual property rights.
I don’t think we should use it to read into Fender’s conduct or character.
Research Notes
Researching this article was very difficult.
When I sat down to write this article, I wanted to make sure that my opinion was informed by facts. That meant trying to locate primary sources: actual rulings on the topic, not reporting or commentary that didn’t provide supporting references.
(For the avoidance of doubt, I consider the press releases from Fender and their legal representatives as primary sources, as they are direct evidence of the claims that Fender are making. I think they’re important, especially if motive comes up in any future challenge to Fender’s claims.)
I’ve had to ignore many of the claims you might have seen in forum posts and YouTube videos, because I just couldn’t find the evidence to back them up.
In my experience, Google is almost useless as a search engine right now. No matter what I tried, all it wanted to show me was recent articles about Fender’s recent win in the German courts. Even trying to restrict by publication date didn’t help.
The vast majority of search results returned by Google were (at best) unhelpful – because none of them link to primary sources. In effect, they’re just unsubstantiated claims.
In particular, I was unable to find a primary source confirming that Fender has previously tried to trademark the Stratocaster body shape in the UK and Europe. Lots of Google search results claim this has happened, but I’ve been unable to find proof.
Google’s AI mode was terrible: it literally invented UK and EU trade mark and case law IDs, because (according to itself) “I do not have the verified primary UK or EU legal records, rulings, or specific application identifiers”. That admission only came after repeatedly checking its quoted sources, and challenging them.
(I also tried popular alternative DuckDuckGo. It didn’t return any results that were helpful, and trying to restrict by publication date didn’t stop it from also returning results about the recent copyright ruling.)
The UK’s Intellectual Property Office’s website does have a search function. Unfortunately, searches for “Fender” return zero results, and the “Person or company involved” input field has a length limit on it, so I can’t even search for “Fender Musical Instruments Corporation”. If there was a failed trademark attempt by Fender, I cannot find it through that search function.
Final Thoughts
I think what Fender is doing is wrong, and the way they’re going about it is not a good look for them. I hope they ultimately lose, and I think that it’ll serve them right if their business declines as a consequence.
I’m still going to play the Fender guitars that I already own – just like I’ve continued playing my Gibson guitars. And I will continue to use them in my blog posts.
But, for now, I’m not going to be spending money on brand-new Fender products. In particular, there are three planned purchases that won’t happen for now:
- I won’t be buying the Fender Bassman Tonemaster amp,
- and when it eventually comes out, I won’t be buying the Fender Tweed Deluxe Tonemaster amp either.
- I also won’t be ordering a Fender Custom Shop version of my Vintera Roadworn Telecaster.
I’ll be looking to get these via the second-hand market, and if that’s not possible, I’ll be looking to buy an equivalent product from Fender’s competitors.
I’m under no illusion here: Fender doesn’t know that I exist, and my purchase decisions aren’t even a rounding error on one of their spreadsheets. I’m the one who is losing out. Fender won’t even notice.
But this is the only action available to me, and I think it’s important that we do consider who we spend our money with. We shouldn’t just shrug our shoulders and go “oh well”.
Anyone who says that we shouldn’t get political … this isn’t the blog for you. Damn right we should. How do you think you got any of the rights and freedoms you currently enjoy?!?
My thoughts are with the guitar stores. They’re the ones who have to deal with the public – Fender has no public stores here in the UK – and they’re already having a tough time of it as it is.
If you do go into a store to discuss this (or, like I did, to cancel an order), be kind. None of this is the store’s fault.