Fender loses guitar copyright case
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"Now we gotta make the best of it, improvise, adapt to the environment, Darwin, shit happens, I Ching, whatever man, we gotta roll with it." VincentComment
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"The Stratocaster body outline is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in a dictionary"
Outline is "generic electric guitar"
Michael Leonard, Tue 31 Mar 2009, 2:45 pm BST
Guitar makers Fender have lost an application to make its Stratocaster, Telecaster and Precision guitar body shapes a trademark in the USA.
Similar applications have previously been rejected, both in the UK and the rest of Europe.
In the court case, Fender had targeted the designs of Stuart Spector Designs, US Music Corporation, ESP Guitars, Sadowsky Guitars, Lakland Musical Instruments, Peavey Electronics, Warmoth Guitar Products, Schecter Guitar Research, Michael Tobias and others as infringing its designs.
But the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office said:
"Fender refers to the 'iconic' status of these [instrument] outlines in American popular culture. However, we must resolve a narrow issue: Do consumers associate these two-dimensional outlines, depicted in the drawings, as indicators of source?"
5 years wait
The litigation has lasted five years and included over 20,000 pages of evidence demonstrating countless companies who have sold guitars that use the body shapes that Fender sought to trademark
"The applicant has not established acquired distinctiveness such that these two-dimensional outlines of guitar bodies, standing alone, serve to indicate source," the TTAB concluded. "The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that these configurations are so common in the industry that they cannot identify source.
"In fact, in the case of the [Stratocaster] body outline, this configuration is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in a dictionary.
This is a Fender
This is not a Fender
Fender loses guitar copyright case | musicradar.com
USPTO TTABVUE. Proceeding Number 91161403“Great losses often bring only a numb shock. To truly plunge a victim into misery, you must overwhelm him with many small sufferings.”Comment
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I always wondered how all these Strat copies could be made legally. Kinda lame for Fender since it is their design. The problem is this lawsuit is 30 years too late.“Great losses often bring only a numb shock. To truly plunge a victim into misery, you must overwhelm him with many small sufferings.”Comment
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Really? Not me. I'm not that good with telling unless it's the headstock shape. The body in those pics look the same to me. The only difference I see other than the Rosewood vs. Maple fingerboard is the Fenders neck is rounded slightly at the end while the copy's neck is cut straight/flat across.“Great losses often bring only a numb shock. To truly plunge a victim into misery, you must overwhelm him with many small sufferings.”Comment
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Nice. My eye isn't that trained. I only see the differences I stated above. But then I could never even find all the missing stuff on the back of my Capt. Crunch cereal box either.“Great losses often bring only a numb shock. To truly plunge a victim into misery, you must overwhelm him with many small sufferings.”Comment
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