No More Fender

Added: 2026-05-21

[00:00:00]They don't care about consumers.

[00:00:02]If they did, they'd try to make a better quality product.

[00:00:08]No more Fender for me. Hello and welcome to another video with me Elmo and this is a completely different kind of video.

[00:00:15]I don't know if I've done anything like this before. I might swear. I don't know how worked up I'll be, but yeah, Fender not just out of tune like this Fender.

[00:00:28]This is a brilliant Fender Strat and I'll talk about this in a moment, but they're just out of tune with reality.

[00:00:36]They won a copyright >> [snorts] >> case in Germany against an AliExpress company that didn't even show up and they won it by maintaining that this is a work of art, the body.

[00:00:53]And um so normally >> [snorts] >> they've been trademark cases where they lost basically.

[00:01:05]Um Now I understand Fender pro trying to protect their interests in various ways, but what they're doing here is they're trying to wipe out everyone who makes a Strat style body and that includes but this isn't isn't just limited to uh Schecter, PRS, Harley Benton, Jet, whatever have you.

[00:01:31]Could potentially even be something like an Ibanez.

[00:01:35]I don't know how far they're going with this. Um but I read a quote somewhere or I read a comment somewhere and I don't know if this is true, but it kind of fits my picture of Leo Fender who founded Fender and came up with this when he was asked about different companies making copies of a Strat and he said that he's really proud that he could design something that lets provides a livelihood for other people in other companies making this shape of a guitar.

[00:02:07]I don't know if it's true or not, but it fits my picture of Leo Fender. It doesn't fit my picture of Fender the company.

[00:02:16]Leo Fender made Strat-style guitars at G&L for instance later on. But so the big problem here is quality. If Fender made better guitars, there would be no problem.

[00:02:31]But they don't. This one is a brilliant one.

[00:02:35]I bought this in 2006 or so, second hand, absolutely brilliant. And my luthier friend Sasha had a look at it and said that one the neck the wood in the neck is worth more than the retail price of one of these Yngwie Malmsteen Strats. And I've later found when I bought and sold other Yngwie Malmsteen Strats that they've been some of them have been absolute dog [ __ ] compared to this.

[00:03:02]I have one other which doesn't compare to this. It's a good guitar, but it's nowhere near this. This is the best guitar I've ever tried. But other Fenders from what I've learned, not so necessarily.

[00:03:15]Not at all.

[00:03:18]So, um That That's one point. If Fender made better guitars, maybe they wouldn't be in such trouble.

[00:03:28]Because you can get a Harley Benton or a Jet or something for a fraction of the price and it's basically just as good or even better. And you can get a PRS Silver Sky. And I haven't tried one of those, but I've heard that they're better than the Fenders.

[00:03:40]Schecter maybe.

[00:03:42]Uh yeah. So, but anyway, it's a copyright, not a trademark thing. And traditionally guitars have had trademarked uh the the headstock because of the shape of the body of an acoustic guitar not really being uh you can't really do too much with it.

[00:04:05]So, they decided you can't trademark the body.

[00:04:07]You can trademark the headstock, and that's it. This is my understanding. I might be a bit off on that. I'm I'm not sure.

[00:04:15]Now, they argued that this body shape resembles the curves of a woman.

[00:04:25]Where I watched the video where KDH explained this, and there are a bunch of videos out there explain this probably better than I do. Um but where he superimposed a picture of a an acoustic guitar over a Strat. And this is that picture, and >> [snorts] >> he said that they're roughly similar.

[00:04:52]And that this bit, which is supposed to be the arm of a dancer and whatever, um is more functional in that you have the strap here, where the acoustic guitars usually had them here somewhere.

[00:05:05]Uh and nowadays you can have them here.

[00:05:09]But, if you want to argue that something is shaped like a woman, well, the acoustic guitar at least has a hole.

[00:05:15]Yeah.

[00:05:16]Let's not go there.

[00:05:18]>> [laughter] >> Uh in the US, this body shape is public domain, which is interesting.

[00:05:25]But, uh so, they won a court case in Dusseldorf, in Germany, which is a kind of regional uh court, I'm if I've understood correctly, which means that that copyright uh decision could be contested in other parts of Germany.

[00:05:46]Definitely in other parts of the EU.

[00:05:50]And this time there will be someone putting the case against Fender.

[00:05:57]So, that all they had was they they filed the complaints against AliExpress once guitar builder there if I understood correctly where the builder just was making blatant knock-offs. And then they didn't show up to court and Fender went, "This isn't a work of art." And the judge was like, "I don't know about guitars."

[00:06:19]I don't know why he sounded like that.

[00:06:22]Or she. Don't assume things.

[00:06:25]Uh yeah, [gasps] so they will at least be getting stiff competition because a lot of people will be fighting this. A lot of companies will be fighting this. And I don't know if I said that I understand them protecting their interests. I do understand that, but this is not protecting their interests. They're trying to wipe out the entire competition because you the companies that received this cease and desist letter from Fender. I mean, they sent out these letters to all of these companies saying, "You have to destroy your inventory.

[00:07:04]You have to recall what you've sold and destroy all that and prove you've done that. And you have to pay compensation and legal fees and and probably bend over backwards and let them do whatever they want to you. I don't know. This would create a monopoly.

[00:07:21]Um quite simply because it would wipe out any competition when it comes to the Strat.

[00:07:29]It would wipe out a lot of these companies because a lot of their profits have been made from S-style guitars.

[00:07:36]And uh I mean, if they were just protecting their interests, they would say something like you pay a license fee or something to us every time you sell one of these.

[00:07:48]That would be kind of reasonable, I guess.

[00:07:51]But this is just we're going to wipe out every one of you.

[00:07:55]And you can still sell other types of electric guitars. That's what they said in the letter.

[00:08:01]Uh which isn't up to them to decide, but uh yeah.

[00:08:05]Mm.

[00:08:06]And that would create a monopoly. And every monopoly ever has been bad for the consumer.

[00:08:14]Except for Monopoly, the board game.

[00:08:16]That's just creates angry situations.

[00:08:21]And it's been a complete PR [ __ ] by Fender. I mean, absolute disaster. I mean, what are these idiots thinking?

[00:08:28]Absolute pillocks. I'm done with them.

[00:08:31]And when I heard about this, this got me thinking about the future of this channel as well.

[00:08:36]Because uh it's been I'll be honest, it's not been great for a while now.

[00:08:41]And uh a lot of this channel has to do with guitar reviews, and a lot of those reviews have been strat-shaped guitars. And if Fender somehow do manage to pull off this complete monopoly thing, well, uh no one will watch my old view reviews of certain guitars.

[00:09:03]Uh I That will be a big part of this channel identity gone.

[00:09:09]In terms of me not being able to review strat-style guitars. Yes, there are still Les Paul type things and Telecasters, provided that Fender don't go and get a copyright on Telecaster shape.

[00:09:22]Um I don't see why not.

[00:09:27]And the part of the problem with this channel has been and I've been thinking about the future of this channel, it has been partly because of that orange ball sack in the White House who decided that tariffs would be a great idea. That's when I saw the first dip in numbers on this channel and the second one when he decided it was a good idea to invade Iran or attack Iran, sorry.

[00:09:47]And that's when I saw a second big drop off in numbers and one big drop off I saw in numbers when face it's not Facebook you stupid bearded person. Uh when YouTube decided to put on the home page instead of six videos, long form videos before you have to scroll. Uh now there's three and then there's shorts which means that all of the channels um competing for long short long form attention now don't have six slots to compete for, only have three slots to compete for which means uh we get less views. Quite simple.

[00:10:26]And money is down and subscribers are down.

[00:10:29]Although um the the affiliate money is still pretty much the same.

[00:10:37]And I've been watching my videos because they've been been doing extremely well among people who watch this channel regularly.

[00:10:45]So it does it's a couple of days, really solid good viewership. The numbers are all up and then it just and um that's [clears throat] had me worried for a while now.

[00:10:57]And um put in what Fender are doing now, I really started to think about what should I do with this channel. Well, one thing I am going to do is I'm going to make uh at least one video of guitars that Fender you don't want you to know about. I'm going to still review a couple of strat shape guitars that I have coming up. I'm also going to try and see what lessons work like on this channel. So I have my lesson channel and it's been doing pretty okay, but it's still like 5,000 uh subscribers whereas I have over 80, close to 90,000 here.

[00:11:37]We'll see how this audience reacts to those lessons and how those same videos do on this channel. Just so you know what I'm going to be doing.

[00:11:45]Uh and basically I urge anyone if you're Harley Benton or you're a smaller company, whichever company, you should fight this and I urge you to I mean some of these have GoFundMe pages so that they can cover the legal bills.

[00:12:07]And if you have the money, go and support those smaller companies.

[00:12:12]Because in the end Fender are doing this against not just these other companies, but against consumers.

[00:12:21]They don't care about consumers.

[00:12:23]Uh if they did they'd try to make a better quality product at lower price.

[00:12:30]They care about their own pockets. This is the same company that make the Fender Frontman which is a horrible amp in my opinion.

[00:12:39]If you like it, fine.

[00:12:41]I'm not going to promote anything of mine in this channel.

[00:12:44]Go and support whatever company um you can go and support a small channel.

[00:12:52]You can support this channel. I've talked about that in various places. But I'm done with Fender.

[00:12:59]I [ __ ] them.

[00:13:02]They can go intercourse themselves for all I care.

[00:13:05]I'm going to keep the two that I have and I might buy a second-hand one if I manage to find one.

[00:13:11]If you want to check out the video where I talk about some Strat-style guitars that aren't all Fender that's here. I hope this wasn't too messy and I hope you enjoyed it. Take care. Goodbye.