Earlier this year, the Fender music company dropped a bombshell. On the basis of a small court case in Germany where the defendant didn’t bother to show up, granting them an undefended win, they slapped cease and desist notices on a number of guitar builders and suppliers. The claim was that the Stratocaster guitar has a unique shape that should be protected by law as a work of art and that the recipients should stop manufacture of similar instruments, destroy their stock, turn over their customer records and, as the cherry on top, pay Fender’s legal costs.

Given that the defendant in the original case was a company based in China and, more importantly, that the strat type design is a beautiful but functional response to the ergonomics of guitar playing which has been widely used for around 75 years without the status of protected art, the widespread response of the guitar community has amounted to “what are they smokin’?”. However, that doesn’t stop the fact that Fender still haven’t called off the dogs or issued anything like an apology and the issue is still ongoing.

When I picked up a five string bass this year, Fender and their subsidiary Squier were off the cards for me. My experience of Fenders is that most of the high price tag is for the name, not the quality, so they were never a contender but I think Squier do good stuff and I still regularly play the Jaguar bass I picked up a few years ago. One person whose decisions are more influential than mine who has also sworn off Fenders is guitarist Tim Pierce. Here is his recent video, talking about the latest update and also giving a perspective from one of his guitar builder friends who is still under the burden of Fender’s bullying tactics: