Fender isn't holding back (no surprises)

Added: 2026-06-02

[00:00:00]I knew Fender was going to go after bigger company sooner rather than later.

[00:00:03]I didn't realize it was going to be this soon. Of course, we've got ourselves Fender going after PRS. They've decided to send out a cease and desist to them as well as all the other smaller companies in regards to the Silver Sky.

[00:00:16]I can kind of see why they did it though, or at least their justification and reasoning for it.

[00:00:22]Apparently, according to Reverb's data in 2022 and 2023, the Silver Sky outsold the Strat. It's also been one of the best-selling guitars over the past 3 years.

[00:00:33]Of course, Fender's going to be looking at that and going, "Hmm, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money, money.

[00:00:39]Where's my money?"

[00:00:41]Question is, are they going to go after them to try and get them to change the design enough so that they're not cannibalizing a market that they want complete control over, or are they going out there to basically say, "Well, you're selling a bunch of them, we want our cut of it." It's unknown.

[00:00:59]Of course, we've got the, you know, company disagreeing with Fender's assessment. They're basically saying, "Look, you know, we disagree with it.

[00:01:07]We're going to, you know, sit back, figure out our options, go from there."

[00:01:11]They haven't issued much of a statement beyond then, which obviously, you know, they've only just started. They received the cease and desist.

[00:01:18]But we can see that there is similarity between the two guitars. You've got the Silver Sky on the left and the Strat on the right. Obviously, the Silver Sky is of the same, you know, DNA as what the Strat is, but it is different.

[00:01:33]How different? Well, obviously, it's got a different headstock, which is, you know, a big key thing. But it's all these small little evolutions to the design. So, you've got the cutaway that has been changed. It's a little bit uh deeper. You've also got the uh top of it as well, which is beveled inwards. You got a different heel shape as well.

[00:01:52]And all the small things. So, even the knobs. The knobs are very Strat-like, but they are distinctly different. And the control jack plate output, it's not just a little simple you know, piece of flat pressed metal. It's got some contour and shape to it just like the trim does. So, it's all of these little incremental differences that take the Silver Sky from being just a one-to-one strat clone to being kind of an evolution on the design.

[00:02:19]Fender, however, don't like the fact that people have opinions online. And according to them, people are getting you know, all the details wrong.

[00:02:29]Apparently, the focus is on products that completely replicate the exact body design, which is a bit funny given that we were just discussing 2 seconds ago about how the Silver Sky isn't exactly one-to-one. There are distinct differences between them. And like I said in the last video, they're going after smaller companies to start off with at least because it's just going to be easier for them to litigate and to get a win.

[00:02:54]Taking a look here, LSL was one of the main companies that's been in the news about this. And they launched a GoFundMe campaign, and so far hit about $7,000 at the time of the writing of this article.

[00:03:06]They're a smaller company, and legal fees add up massively.

[00:03:11]As they say down the bottom here, if we fight this solely on our own, there's a very good chance we could be bankrupted, out of business quickly, and we're not alone in this situation.

[00:03:21]You know, like I said in the last video, Fender going to go after all those small companies, and they're going to say, "You come to the table and you negotiate with us, and you follow you know, the terms we set. Otherwise, we will continue this litigation, and guess what? We have bigger, deeper pockets."

[00:03:38]PRS, not exactly a small company, but they're not as large as say the behemoth that's behind Fender.

[00:03:46]The worst part is that in the case of PRS, it's not the first time that they've had a lawsuit like this.

[00:03:53]Of course, in the early 2000s, Gibson decided that they wanted to go head-to-head with them on battling the body shape design of the single-cut guitar.

[00:04:04]It was in the early 2000s that they received a cease and desist. So, March 27th, they got their first cease and desist from Gibson in relation to the manufacture of the single-cut.

[00:04:16]Uh later that year, Gibson sued PRS for trademark infringement. PRS uh filed a counter-claim stating that it hadn't infringed on any valid Gibson trademark, and the guitar industry sat mesmerized, blah blah blah blah blah.

[00:04:28]This dragged on for a number of years.

[00:04:32]In the early 2000s, it went all the way up through to the Supreme Court. Uh pretty much ended up with PRS getting the ability to manufacture the guitar again.

[00:04:44]Um so, it was There we go. September 12th, 2005, PRS published a press release. Long-pending trademark dispute between PRS and Gibson, blah blah blah blah blah, reversed lower court decision and ordered the dismissal of PRS's uh Gibson suit against PRS. So, they resumed production of that in 2005 towards the end. So, that means that you had a period of time from 2004 through 2005.

[00:05:12]There we go. July 2nd, 2004 through to 12th of September, 2005, that they were unable to manufacture the single-cut model.

[00:05:21]Add together loss of sales of that model, the cost of obviously legal legal filings and solicitors and lawyers and all that kind of jazz, and that is a massive massive cost.

[00:05:35]Company like PRS, they were kind of, you know, a bit on the smaller, still boutique-y side. They just got into the SE range back in the early 2000s, late '90s. So, they weren't as big as they were today. So, that is a big massive chunk of money.

[00:05:51]It comes back to what a lot of people say about Fender and their, you know, lawsuits at the moment. I see a lot of comments and a lot of posts online about, "Oh, but Fender don't have the trademark. They don't have the copyright. They don't have this. They don't have that."

[00:06:04]They may not. They have a small win in a court in Germany that was a default judgment. They won because the other guys didn't turn up.

[00:06:14]Sometimes that's enough for companies to go, "Awesome. We're going to go after the next guys and next guys and the next guys and keep fighting it from there."

[00:06:22]They're throwing out the cease and desists and pretty much hoping that they have enough manpower behind them in terms of, you know, lawyers and a big massive trust fund to be able to go and get these people to basically give in to them.

[00:06:37]Going after PRS this early in the process is a it's, you know, it's a bold move, Cotton, as they say.

[00:06:44]And it's not the first time. It's not the last time.

[00:06:48]And it's just this kind of stuff always happens.

[00:06:53]Back to what I was saying about, you know, Fender and uh PRS and the lawsuit and how Fender don't have this and they don't have that. Blah blah blah blah blah.

[00:07:02]Gibson didn't either.

[00:07:04]Gibson have gone to court with Dean for a number of years. The end result was Dean was no longer able to manufacture and sell the Z and the V models based on the Explorer and the Flying V. Guitars that Dean had been doing for 50 odd years.

[00:07:21]However, the other trade-off of that as well was that the ES series body design actually ended up being marked as generic in the US and the US alone. So, anyone can now make an ES shaped guitar.

[00:07:37]There might be small things that Gibson can fight about it, but the the outline and the concept of it other than the headstock is now something that basically anyone can make.

[00:07:47]Uh but as we can see here, the beginning of the end of the long-running case came in March 2025 when a jury entered an opinion that essentially reasserted Dean's initial defeat.

[00:07:56]As with the ruling of a different jury in 2021, Dean {slash} Armadillo, which is the parent company, they were found to have counterfeited a number of Gibson trademarks and could no longer advertise or sell the infringing guitars.

[00:08:08]In the 2025 ruling, these were found to be the Dean Grand Sport, the Dean V Flying V, and the Dean Z, which is the Explorer shape, which explored uh these designs infringed on the SG, the Flying V, and the Explorer.

[00:08:24]So, that is a big big chunk of the Dean range, you know, a lot of people know Dean for doing the Explorer design and for doing the Vs. Um obviously they do the hybrids and the mashups. Uh so, you've got like the um ML, of course. Uh there was the other one was the Coupe, which is like a Les Paul meets an Explorer. All of that. Um So, yeah. So, Gibson obviously didn't get out of this entirely scot-free. So, Dean basically only owed $1 in damages plus, you know, 170k in legal fees.

[00:08:55]And also agreeing with one of Dean's claims that the trademark for the ES body shape was now to be generic.

[00:09:03]Uh Gibson was going to uh go out there and appeal that and they were basically struck down and told no, you cannot do that.

[00:09:13]So, it's not just about specific legal things that someone may or may not have.

[00:09:20]A lot of these things come down to how well someone can enforce something and how well someone can basically strong-arm others into actually, you know, complying with it's there. For example, you might have a trademark, uh you might have a patent.

[00:09:33]And a big company might do something and just decide, "Oh well, whatever, we're going to ignore your patent or your trademark." What do you do? You have to go out there, get a lawyer, go through courts, takes months, takes years.

[00:09:45]By the time everything's gone through and all been done, okay, you might win. You might get a small amount back. Big companies made a lot of money out of it and you've lost a lot of money, you've lost your sales, you've lost your market position as well because maybe they've become more synonymous with that particular brand or style.

[00:10:04]So, yeah, Fender are going out there and they're going to basically throw everything they can at the wall and see what sticks.

[00:10:13]It'll be interesting to see what the outcome is. PRS obviously have just turned around and said, you know, we disagree with the, you know, the assertions by Fender.

[00:10:22]Um that's basically all they've said.

[00:10:24]They've not really released much else out of that. So, I assume that they are lawyering up big time and from what I've heard from other people in the industry as well, there's a couple of other companies that have basically banded together and sort of sharing their information to be able to try and fight this as best as they can.

[00:10:40]All Fender needs though is a couple of wins and they've basically got, you know, some kind of control over the narrative and some kind of control over what companies are going to decide to fight because if you're someone who's sitting there, you're a small company and Fender comes through and says, "Hey, you know, you've got to stop doing this."

[00:10:58]But you see three other companies that have gone toe-to-toe with them and lost, what are you likely to do?

[00:11:06]You losses and go, "Okay, there's no chance I'm going to win." Or pony up a bunch of dosh and go and try and fight it. It's It's hard.

[00:11:15]I'm kind of more interested to see what's going to happen with Reverb cuz Fender, their parent company, Servo Corp Pacific, own Reverb.

[00:11:24]Yay! So, they now control that marketplace and I would I'd be lying if I didn't think that in the next couple of months you're going to start seeing what you can and can't list as like strat-shaped on there. Or you're going to see them sort of like enforcing their little thing going, "Oh, no, this brand can't sell this product on here now because it infringes on Fender's you know, copyrights or trademarks or whatever else they want to say." So, it's it's it's not great and it's going to be an absolute wild ride over the next couple of months. You know, big companies with big pockets, that is what they do. And they all do it amongst themselves.

[00:12:03]Another interesting thing is you've also got Gibson versus Heritage. You know, they had an agreement back in 1991 that, you know, "Okay, you guys keep doing your thing." Now, both of them owned by big massive private equity groups. So, you've got Gibson obviously owned by KKR and then you've also got Caldecott Music Group Group should say CMG formally BandLab which owns Heritage.

[00:12:31]Now, they have obviously have owned them since 2016 and they've kind of turned them to absolute junk honestly in my opinion. Got rid of a lot of good quality staff that knew what they were doing, put in a lot of CNC machinery and churning out a lot more. But there was basically a argument between them two and they went to court, they did their thing and they just keep fighting. So, pretty much you know, Heritage went forth and said, "Hey, you guys are probably going to try and sue us or do something like that. So, we want to make sure that we can continue doing what we're doing." And both companies wasted a whole bunch of money for pretty much nothing. That's it.

[00:13:11]But that's what these companies do.

[00:13:16]Ah, well, that's what they do and this is what I do. You like what I do? Like, subscribe, share it around, do all that kind of jazz.

[00:13:24]Um, yeah. Now, I'm sure I'll have something to say on the next thing that pops up in the near future, so until the next time, I'll see you.