This past May, worldwide musical instrument companies including Yamaha and PRS Guitars received cease-and-desist letters from Munich. The documents, authored by a group of German lawyers, stated that Fender Musical Instruments had newly acquired copyright protection over the iconic Stratocaster electric guitar design. And they demanded that non-Fender-produced Strat-shaped guitars be immediately pulled from the European market.
Fender’s letters had immediate ripple effects across the global musical instrument business. Some companies agreed to work with Fender and change their guitar designs. But others have since retained their own attorneys and fought back, spurring litigation that will test the strength of Fender’s intellectual property right assertions.
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“Our client has every right to continue to sell its guitars with Strat-style guitar bodies, whenever and wherever it so chooses, as does the entire [musical instrument] industry on a worldwide basis,” wrote an attorney representing some of Fender’s opponents in a May response. “Efforts by your client to bully competitors based on misrepresentations and overstatements are anti-competitive.”
To fully grasp this brewing legal war requires looking into the past, to a series of prior legal proceedings that stretch back nearly 20 years. It turns out Fender has long been warring with much of the music instrument business over the Strat shape, and the battle has extended from the U.S. trademark tribunal to a German courtroom.
