The Fender Stratocaster lawsuit isn’t really about guitars. At least, I don’t think it is…
Fender is fighting to protect the shape of the Stratocaster, decades after a 2009 US ruling rejected its attempt to trademark the body design. Now, following a German court ruling that recognised the Stratocaster body as protected by copyright in Europe, Fender has begun taking legal action against manufacturers and retailers making or selling Strat-style guitars.
On the surface, this looks like a guitar company protecting one of the most recognisable designs in music history. And to be fair, Fender has every right to protect its intellectual property.
But there’s a bigger question underneath it.
What happens when protecting what you’ve built turns into protecting your territory?
That’s where this stops being a story about guitars and starts becoming a story about scarcity, abundance, creativity, and the way we choose to treat the people coming up behind us.
A Shape That Was Never Really Fender’s Alone
The Fender Stratocaster is one of the most recognisable guitar designs ever made. Since its introduction in 1954, its shape has been copied, borrowed from, modified, reinterpreted and used as the starting point for countless other guitars.
That history matters because Fender has been down this road before.
In 2009, the US Trademark Trial and Appeal Board rejected Fender’s attempts to secure trademark protection for the body configurations of the Stratocaster, Telecaster and Precision Bass. The Board found that the designs had become too common in the industry to function as trademarks in the way Fender wanted. In the case of the Stratocaster, the Board noted just how commonplace the silhouette had become.
That might sound like the end of the story.
It wasn’t.
The current fight is happening on a different legal battlefield. In December 2025, the Regional Court of Düsseldorf issued a default judgment finding the Stratocaster body design eligible for copyright protection under German and European law. The case involved near-identical replicas being sold through AliExpress, and the court ordered the defendant to stop distributing them.
There’s an important wrinkle here: it was a default judgment. The defendant didn’t properly participate in the proceedings, meaning the decision wasn’t the kind of fully contested examination of every argument that you might imagine when you hear the words “landmark court ruling.” Legal experts have pointed out that the judgment does not automatically establish a universal copyright monopoly over every Strat-style guitar.
Fender, understandably, sees things differently. In March 2026, the company announced the ruling as a significant victory and said it established enforceable rights against guitars using the Stratocaster body shape in Germany and other EU countries.
And the dispute hasn’t exactly gone away.
Fender has sent cease-and-desist demands to a number of manufacturers and retailers, while Thomann, one of Europe’s biggest music retailers, has taken legal action of its own. In July 2026, Fender escalated that dispute further by suing Thomann over Harley Benton guitars.
So yes, there is a real legal question here.
But I’m more interested in the question underneath it.
How much can you hold onto before protecting what you’ve built starts holding everyone else back?
It’s Not Really About Guitars
There are obviously two sides to this.
One side says Fender created the Stratocaster. It became iconic because Fender invested decades of money, talent and reputation into the design. If other companies can simply reproduce that design and sell it without consequence, what’s the incentive to create anything distinctive in the first place?
That’s a fair argument.
The other side says the Stratocaster has become part of the visual language of the electric guitar. Its influence has spread so far and so widely that trying to pull the design back under exclusive control could have consequences for an entire industry, particularly smaller builders who have spent decades working within that tradition.
That’s also a fair argument.
And honestly, I’m not particularly interested in pretending I know enough about German copyright law to tell you who’s going to win.
What interests me is the mindset underneath the whole thing.
Because I’ve seen the same tension play out in much smaller ways.
Not in courtrooms.
In businesses.
In creative studios.
In friendships.
Two Stories That Explain the Real Problem
My wife built her photography business after losing a job and asking herself what her dream career might actually look like.
She was already an amateur photographer with a DSLR, and a friend who had gone professional helped her take it further. Then, while my wife was learning how to edit, that friend literally pulled up a chair beside her and showed her how.
She could have kept that knowledge to herself.
She didn’t.
Kelsea didn’t look at my wife and think, Hang on. She’s learning the same thing I know. She could become competition.
She saw someone worth bringing along.
Years later, that encouragement had grown into Blury Photography, the photography studio my wife runs today.
None of that happens if her friend decides that knowledge is something to protect rather than something to share.
That’s the part I keep coming back to.
Her success didn’t make my wife’s success smaller.
It created another photographer.
And there’s an old story that captures something very similar.
There’s Room at the Table
In the Old Testament, King David asks whether anyone from the family of his old friend Jonathan is still alive.
Jonathan has died. Saul, Jonathan’s father and David’s former enemy, has died too. David is now king.
One day David decides he’d like to see if there’s anyone left in Jonathan’s family that he can bless. Eventually, his servants find Jonathan’s son Mephibosheth.
And Mephibosheth is terrified!
From his perspective, a visit from the new king isn’t necessarily good news. He’s a member of King Saul’s family, and David now has every reason to hold hostility towards anyone who’s left that could question his throne.
Instead, David restores his family’s land to him.
Then he does something even stranger.
He tells Mephibosheth that he will always eat at the king’s table.
You can read the whole story in 2 Samuel 9.
David had the power to protect what he had inherited.
He could have guarded his position.
Instead, he made room.
That’s a different way of looking at power.
And I think it’s a different way of looking at success.
What a Scarcity Mindset Actually Costs Us
A scarcity mindset tells you that there’s only so much to go around.
There’s only one good client.
One good idea.
One opportunity.
One seat at the table.
And if someone else gets it, you don’t.
So you guard everything.
You don’t tell people how you do things because they might copy you.
You don’t introduce people to your contacts because they might take your clients.
You don’t share what you’ve learned because knowledge is leverage.
You start treating every colleague as competition.
And eventually, you can spend more energy defending your territory than actually creating something worth defending.
It’s an understandable instinct.
It’s also, more often than not, exhausting.
The alternative is an abundance mindset.
Not the cheesy Instagram version where everyone sits around drinking green juice and pretending money doesn’t matter.
I’m talking about the much simpler belief that your best work isn’t necessarily behind you.
There can be another idea.
Another client.
Another opportunity.
Another song.
Another business.
Another person who hasn’t even arrived yet.
And sometimes the best thing you can do with what you’ve learned is give it away.
Josh Scott Gets It
Josh Scott, who runs JHS Pedals out of Kansas City, USA, is a great example of this in the guitar world.
JHS operates in a brutally competitive market. There are more boutique pedal companies than any guitarist could possibly keep track of, and yet Scott has built a reputation for openly exploring the history, circuits and ideas behind pedals across the industry.
He regularly talks about other manufacturers.
He digs into old designs.
He collaborates.
He teaches.
And he doesn’t seem particularly worried that explaining how something works will suddenly cause the entire pedal industry to collapse.
There’s a confidence underneath that.
It’s the belief that sharing knowledge doesn’t automatically diminish the value of what you have.
Someone helped you get here.
So you help someone else.
That’s abundance.
And that’s why the Fender situation fascinates me.
Because I don’t think the real question is whether Fender is allowed to protect its intellectual property.
Of course it is.
The more interesting question is:
What kind of creative culture do we want to build?
One where every idea becomes a piece of territory to defend?
Or one where the things we create become starting points for other people to build on?
We All Got a Seat Somewhere
Here’s the uncomfortable truth.
None of us got here entirely by ourselves.
Someone taught us something.
Someone answered the “stupid” question and also told us it wasn’t stupid.
Someone lent us a piece of gear.
Someone made an introduction.
Someone showed us how to edit.
Someone gave us our first opportunity.
Someone pulled up a chair.
Even the people who genuinely built something from nothing probably didn’t build it completely alone.
And if somebody did that for you, there’s a pretty good chance you’re here because they didn’t think your success would somehow diminish theirs.
That’s worth remembering.
Especially if you’re running a business.
Especially if you’re a creative.
Especially if you’re building something from scratch.
Because scarcity can sneak up on you.
You can start by protecting something valuable and end up becoming afraid of everyone who might want the same thing.
You can spend so much time worrying about someone copying you that you stop creating.
You can become so focused on defending your seat that you forget there’s room for another chair.
And maybe that’s the real lesson buried underneath the Fender Stratocaster lawsuit.
You can protect what you’ve built without believing that everyone else has to lose for you to win.
There’s room at the table.
The question is whether we’re willing to pull up another chair.
This Is Why I Make Content
This whole thing actually started as a video for Blury Audio.
Most of what I do is about podcasting, production and helping people tell their stories properly. But the longer I spend around creators and business owners, the more convinced I am that the thing we’re really making isn’t content.
It’s a body of work.
A collection of ideas.
A record of what we know.
A way of putting something useful into the world that might still matter long after we’ve finished recording it.
That’s one of the reasons I love podcasting.
One conversation can become a video, an episode, a blog post, short-form clips, quotes, ideas and a permanent library of your thinking.
I wrote about that in my previous post, The Evergreen Content Advantage: Why Your Business Needs a Podcast in 2026.
The goal isn’t to make more noise.
It’s to make something worth keeping.
And if you’re a business owner, musician or creator sitting on a story that deserves a proper seat at the table, that’s exactly the kind of work I love doing at Blury Audio.
Book in a FREE 15min consult with me to see how we can bring your story to the right audience.
If you’d rather watch than read, here’s the video that started this whole conversation:
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