Tag Archives: intellectual property

Copyright, Music, Stupidity, Treating Fans Like Shit

Fender Wants Your Guitar Back

Fender has lost its mind.

It thinks it can copyright a shape, and call that “heritage.”

That’s corporate greed, pretending it’s preserving culture.

The Stratocaster body shape is not sacred scripture. It’s a guitar shape that entered the bloodstream of modern music decades ago. Pretending to own the shape now is like claiming ownership of the power chord, the double cutaway, or rock and roll itself.

And somehow this whole mess started with Fender suing an AliExpress seller in Germany.

The seller never showed up.

Fender won by default.

Then, suddenly, that default judgment became the foundation for a wider campaign. Cease-and-desist letters started flying. Builders, retailers and manufacturers of their own guitars using the Stratocaster body shape, found themselves being told that Fender now had legal proof that it owned the Stratocaster body shape.

Not a patent. Not a trademark. A copyright.

And that’s where things start getting ridiculous.

Because this wasn’t simply about stopping counterfeit guitars with fake Fender logos on the headstock. Most musicians understand that. Most builders understand that.

The company reportedly demanded that builders and retailers destroy their existing inventory.

Destroy it. Millions of dollars in manufacturing and research/development.

And then things got even uglier.

Fender allegedly wanted stores and manufacturers to hand over the names and addresses of customers who had already bought guitars with Strat body shapes.

The request?

Have those customers return their guitars so they too could be destroyed.

Read that again.

A billion-dollar corporation wasn’t just trying to stop future sales. It wanted guitars already sitting in people’s homes.

That’s the moment this stopped looking like brand protection and started looking like corporate intimidation.

And nobody likes a bully. Make no mistake, that’s exactly how this looks.

Then comes the inevitable question.

Why now?

The Stratocaster body shape debuted in 1954.

Seventy-plus years later we’re suddenly being told the shape is protected in a way that thousands of builders and guitar tinkerers somehow missed?

Think of EVH tinkering with a Stratocaster body, to come up with his sound and the Frankenstein look. George Lynch playing Charvel and then ESP’s that use the Stratocaster body shape. Hell, Lynch even makes Custom guitars right now utilizing the Strat body shape. Add to that list Kirk Hammett and his ESP guitars and every other guitarist that played a guitar with a Strat body that wasn’t Fender. All of the guitars are illegal according to Fender.

And let’s be honest about who’s making these decisions.

Fender’s CEO, Edward “Bud” Cole, is a Fender lifer. He knows the history. He knows the market. He knows exactly what the Stratocaster means to players.

Which means this isn’t confusion.

But here’s the uncomfortable truth.

Fender is no longer automatically the best guitar in the room. There was a time when the logo alone was enough.

Not anymore.

Today there are boutique builders producing instruments with better fretwork, better neck profiles, tighter quality control and greater consistency than many production-line Fenders.

We feel it immediately as soon as we pick up a guitar and within ten seconds we know.

No legal brief changes that. No cease-and-desist letter changes that.

The PR damage may be even worse.

Because Fender looks like the guy who arrives at the party after midnight, grabs the microphone and starts yelling at everyone.

Nobody likes that guy. Nobody respects that guy. And nobody forgets that guy.

The guitar industry has already lived through this movie. Gibson went after PRS over the single-cut body shape.

The courts ultimately rejected the idea that one company could permanently monopolize a broadly recognized guitar design.

That should have been the lesson.

Instead Fender looked at history and apparently concluded:

Let’s try it ourselves. Only louder.

And the saddest part?

Fender should know better. Its reputation wasn’t built by lawsuits or cease-and-desist letters or by demanding customer lists or threatening independent builders.

It was built by making great guitars.

This entire campaign feels disconnected from players and completely connected to spreadsheets.

That’s how great brands start to decay. Not because competitors catch them. Because they convince themselves that people love the logo more than the product. They don’t.

That’s why this whole thing lands so badly.

It’s petty.

It’s defensive.

It’s short-sighted.

And most importantly, it’s unnecessary.

If Fender wants respect, make better guitars. If Fender wants loyalty, earn it. If Fender wants to remain the standard, stop acting like the standard needs a lawyer.

Because the truth is already out there.

The shape is not the product. The player is.

And if Fender has forgotten that, the damage it’s doing to its own brand may last a lot longer than any body-shape ruling ever will.

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A to Z of Making It, Copyright, Derivative Works, Influenced, Music, My Stories, Unsung Heroes

All Ideas Come From Somewhere Before

When I started writing music back in the day, I would take the music and lyrics from songs I liked and altered them. That would be version 1 of my new song. Of course, it sounded a lot like the original song. However after a few re-writes, you could hear that my song had influences but it was starting to take shape in its own unique way. The lyrics would end up changing completely however I might have kept the phrasing or the rhymes similar to the original. Once finished it was clear that my ideas/my intellectual property had an influence from something that came before.

It’s probably why people shouldn’t get all emotional over intellectual property. When you hear artists saying they put their blood, sweat and tears into their works, you might want to take it with a grain a salt. Yes, they did put their blood, sweat and tears in being influenced and taking what came before, shaping it, tweaking it and re-writing it, to create something which in the end, sounds unique enough to call their own.

And artists who do create something so new and off the wall, are more or less artists who are servicing a niche core audience, or are forgotten or unknown.

But no one expects artists to do something so off the wall original. People like familiarity. Derek Thompson in his book “Hit Makers” mentioned how people are drawn to music that might be new, yet familiar enough to be recognizable. In other words, that new song we like has enough variation in it to make it not a carbon copy of its source influence.

It’s the reason why we listen to a song on repeat. We love repetition. I bet you that on any given day, the majority of music you listen to is music you have heard before. Let’s say 9 songs out of 10, are songs you’ve heard before. And our love for repetition also means we go looking for songs that sound familiar.

So all of our ideas have already been stolen.

Now that we all know that, maybe we can focus on developing connections and creating works influenced by our past. And you create by using your influences.

Because there is no such thing as the genius loner. It’s a myth. We are all social people and our creativity is fuelled by our social environments.

Every single day, we take in our surroundings, we set meaningful and important goals and we are always thinking of solutions to problems.

A neuroscientist and a psychologist broke down creativity into three main buckets;

  • Bending means you take a previous work and re-model it in some way. Think of my post about “Sanitarium” from Metallica.
  • Blending means merging previous works together so you have multiple melodies and re-cutting it to suit what you want to write. Jimmy Page was great at doing this with Led Zeppelin’s music.
  • Breaking is taking a short and important musical idea otherwise known as a musical fragment and building on it. Think of my post on “One Riff To Rule Them All”, which covers the A pedal point riff used in songs like “Two Minutes To Midnight”.

All three of these elements are connected and every creator uses these elements when they are writing, without even knowing it.

The differences between humans and computers is how we store information and how we retrieve information. For the computer, the riff stored on the hard drive will sound exactly the same three years later, however that same riff stored in our head would be different.

Why.

Our brain breaks it down, blends it and bends it with other information. This massive mash up of ideas in our brains is our creativity. And when we play that riff three years later, it has a different feel, different phrasing or something else. Some of them stink and sometimes we create something that breaks through into society.

To me, “Comfortably Numb” matters because of that brilliant outro guitar solo from Dave Gilmour. “We’re Not Gonna Take It” worked because of its timeless message and video clip. “The Final Countdown” and “Jump” had the perfect keyboard riff. The characters in “Living On A Prayer” are unforgettable.

Of course, each one has other attributes however one thing normally sticks with us. There was a certain authenticity behind each.

Which is funny because I’ve been reading a lot of press releases about the latest release of “insert any band name here” being “authentic”.

What is authentic?

How do we define authenticity?

I asked some friends and they reckon, authenticity is saying whatever is on your mind and doing what a person feels like doing.

I disagreed.

Authenticity to me is someone who is the keeps their promises and is same person regardless of whether someone is looking at them or not. In all walks of life I have come across people who try to appeal to whatever is in right now. Whatever is in right now is momentary. It’s always evolving and changing. However a person who remains the same regardless of the status quo, could be the status quo for a brief time, by being authentic.

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