So, I’m sitting here looking out the window, drinking my Black Rifle Dark Chocolate coffee, and trying to wrap my brain around the fact that 2026 is officially the year the guitar industry decided to stop worrying about making actual music and start suing everyone over a bunch of 70-year-old curves. My entire YouTube subscription feed is completely broken right now because of this Fender mess, and honestly, the whole thing is just goofy.
The backstory to how we even got here is ridiculous. A few months ago, Fender gets this totally cheap, default win in some local regional court in Düsseldorf, Germany. What happened was they found some random factory on AliExpress selling blatant, ultra-cheap counterfeits. Fender basically baited them into shipping a guitar over to Germany so it was on EU soil, and then they slapped them with a lawsuit. But the Chinese company didn’t even bother to turn up to defend themselves. It was a total no-show. So Fender walks away with a default judgment by default, and suddenly their boardroom spreadsheet guys are acting like they’re the undisputed heavyweight champions of the world, thinking they have a holy mandate to rewrite how global guitars are made.
So what do they do? They hire this massive international law firm, Bird & Bird, and they just go completely nuclear.
Normally, when a massive corporation wants to bully the market, they pick one brand, pile-drive them into the dirt, and scare everyone else into falling in line. That’s the classic Gibson move. But Fender apparently just went to Thomann Music’s website, clicked on the “S-Type Guitars” category, and just hit everyone.
This is exactly where Phillip McKnight broke the whole thing wide open on his “Know Your Gear” channel, and he’s completely right about how unhinged this is. Phil was talking about how small, independent luthiers—guys who are literally hand-shaping necks in tiny shops—were calling him all week in a total, absolute panic. The paperwork Fender is dropping on people’s doorsteps is like 50 pages of pure corporate terror. They aren’t just telling people to stop selling double-cuts; they are demanding that these builders recall every single S-style guitar they’ve ever sold, hand over their private customer lists, and literally destroy their own inventory with a tractor or whatever and show physical proof of the wreckage. Oh, and they want a quarter-million euros upfront in damages, plus they expect the builders to pay Fender’s €3,500 legal bill just for the privilege of receiving the threat.
The most bizarre, poetry-slam part of the actual legal text is that Fender’s lawyers are trying to argue the Strat shape is “fine art” because Leo Fender originally modeled the body contours after the “sexiness and curves of a woman.” They literally have to say that because they don’t have utility patent protections on a design from 1954, so they’re trying to claim they own a proprietary sculpture. It’s just pure, unfiltered greed because the post-pandemic market is soft, sales are down, and the bean counters realized they can’t scale profit through cool gear anymore, so they sent the lawyers to steal everyone else’s lunch.
But the whole thing just blew up in their faces because the deadline for builders to respond was Monday, May 25th.
A bunch of the targeted boutique shops pooled their cash together and hired Ron Bienstock. If you know guitar history, Bienstock is the absolute legend of an IP lawyer who famously beat Fender back in 2009 and got the Strat body shape declared public domain in the US. He’s back, and his official response letter absolutely eviscerates Fender’s lawyers.
First, Bienstock basically tells them that a default judgment against a no-show factory in a localized German court means absolutely nothing to American luthiers. You can’t use a European loophole to hold global guitar culture hostage. Then he points out that Fender is completely rewriting history by claiming the Strat was the exclusive “artistic creation” of Leo Fender, totally erasing the massive design work of Bill Carson and Freddie Tavares.
But the absolute best, most hilarious part of the whole thing? Bienstock caught Fender’s high-priced lawyers in a massive, embarrassing blunder. In the official cease-and-desist paperwork, Bird & Bird included a photograph meant to represent a “genuine Fender Stratocaster” as their legal baseline. Bienstock looked at the photo and realized they accidentally used a picture of the cheap Chinese counterfeit guitar from the AliExpress court case. Fender’s own elite legal counsel literally cannot tell the difference between their own flagship product and a knockoff in their own official legal threats. Their entire argument about “market confusion” just completely disintegrated.
Like Phil said on his channel, at some point, the S-shape stopped being a corporate product and became the literal visual language of the electric guitar itself. Guitar players don’t care about boardroom meetings or corporate spreadsheets. We rally behind level frets, great electronics, solid quality control, and killer tone. People aren’t buying a Suhr or an LsL because they’re trying to trick their friends into thinking it’s a Fender; they’re buying them because those companies actually give players modern features like stainless steel frets and roasted maple necks while Fender acts like changing a paint color to “Ultra Cosmic Mintburst” is the equivalent of reinventing fire.
By swinging their weight around trying to scare the smaller companies that players actually love, Fender isn’t going to sell more guitars—they’re just turning themselves into the ultimate playground bully, and it’s already backfiring horribly.
Check out Phillip McKnight’s YouTube video. I think that he was one of the first to do any content on this. Since then it seems like everyone with a guitar channel on the platform is weighing in and voicing their negative opinions (rightfully so) on this.
