This is interesting
To be fair, Fender has a point
3 Likes
Didnât realize that spanner was still on YouTube. 
2 Likes
Yeah wait till they get the Tele, then the P bass and Jazz bass would soon follow. Itâs still be years away though with the appeals and everything.
2 Likes
maybe, maybe not, now they know how to procede in court, it wouldnât take much longer to get the rest of their designs added under the same ruling.
Thay had to wait until G&L went under before they could start playing copyright troll. Now they want to extract fees for items that can not be copyrighted, only loosely trademarked.
Lawyers suck.
1 Like
I wouldnât read too much into the court ruling. Yes, they did win, but itâs a default judgment from a regional (lower) court.
Hereâs some info in German:
4 Likes
My take on it is that when it is advertised or known as a Strat style body there is an acknowledgement as to the inspiration.
Whether it is worth it or too late to pursue in the courts is another matter.
I say this as someone who enjoys a good knock off
My guess is that they waited WAY too long, like decades too long, to win in the top courts. Consider âKleenexâ. âXeroxâ (although not used much today). And the Motorola trademark âSix Sigmaâ. They never enforced their trademarks. Now theyâre unenforceable.
3 Likes
I do agree with that
Trademark has to be actively defended, copyright doesnât. They should have gotten a design patent, which is specifically for things like distinctive shapes, as part of a design, but are stylistic in nature. Logos are protected via design patents.
2 Likes
Why? Didnât CBS originally purchase the rights to manufacture the full Fender lineup?
How do you trademark a statistical reference? Wouldnât that be like trademarking the concept of an exponent?
Six Sigma is also a business process used to improve a business.
1 Like
Yep, Motorola was in the vanguard, but I would argue that it was GE / Welch that made Six Sigma famous. He was certainly the executive that was name checked all the time when I was trained in the late 90s.
From what I hear, Fender could do with applying some of the concepts 
2 Likes
Welch made it famous, but he got it from the CEO of Allied Signal who got it from us (Motorola). We âinventedâ the use of statistical analysis for solving business problems in the early 80âs. One of the first two major projects we used the Six Sigma process on was on our global financial reporting systems. We won the first Malcolm Baldridge National Quality Award in 1988. I spent my last 8 working years as a Motorola consultant working with C-level execs and their one-downs on integrating Six Sigma into their business (the first 2 years in the U.S. working with Citibank where we eliminated $946 million of direct cost in 2 years, then Asia, then Asia and Europe). Motorola fragmented in 2004 and offered me a great package. I took it and retired at 53.
Six Sigma is a great tool that almost no one uses correctly. None of the big 6, then 5, then 4 consulting companies gave a s**t about client results. It was all about billable hours, the more, the better. And it didnât save Motorola from the politics of the senior executives. What a sad end to a great company. 
3 Likes
Leo Fender continued to advance the art of guitar and bass design once his non-compete clause expired. These developments manifested at G&L and Musicman.
G&L also owned the copyright to Leo Fenderâs image and trademarks. Fender swooped in and bought that stuff up when G&L went under. Now that there is no âvalidâ competitor to the ownership of Strat-shaped guitars, the lawyers will be innovating more than the FMIC engineers it seems.
Time will tell, but this is a frequently repeated chain of events in todayâs Corporate America.
Been going on a really long time. Pareto was most likely the father of statistics for quality control.
Yup. Thanks for pointing that out. Motorola repurposed (stole/borrowed) the best bits from the originators. The Toyota Quality System was legendary. I could be wrong, but I still think that Motorola was the first to use statistics to improve business/financial processes (1984-1985). Most early statistical methods use was focused on manufacturing.
Got it! Thanks! âQuality Assurance principles can be applied to any process that outputs either a service, or a productâ
The actual âprocessâ was our internal financial reporting system. At the start of that first project in 1984, it took us about 21 days to close our books each month, the definition of a lagging indicator. The initial goal was âclose on demandâ, a real stretch for a global organization.
Initial data collection showed that we had 7 different financial management software packages in use worldwide. Each country/region would have to print out (yes, print to paper) their monthly reports, send them to corporate HQ in Algonquin, IL, where all of that data would get key-stroked into the corporate software.
We analyzed each of the 7 existing software packages and chose 1 to be the global standard. Rather than doing a very disruptive cold changeover, we developed software translators for each of the nonâselected packages to make them look (to corporate) like the selected package.
After the initial rollout of those translators, we shortened the monthly close to 14 days. Further refinement got us down to 7 days. During this time, the financial tech peeps in each country/region migrated their current package to the selected one, but were able to run them in parallel with the old package due to the translators. Once proper operation of the new package was proven, they switched over to it and shut down their translator.
After much additional work, we abandoned the âclose on demandâ target and settled on 4 hours, still a huge improvement compared to 21 days. Motorola went from one of the last tech companies reporting monthly and quarterly results on Wall Street to becoming the first big tech company to report results and became a bellwether for tech.
The entire project took us about 2 years to complete.
2 Likes