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For those of you who play guitar, you have probably played a stratocaster at one point or another. Or maybe you haven't. The "stratocaster" shape (also called the S-body) is one of the most copied and cloned electric guitar designs in history. Back in 2009, Fender tried to trademark the body shape in the United states and failed. However, Fender recently went back on the offensive and filed a new suit in a German court.
The defendant did not show up, and it appears that Fender has won the German equivalent of a summary judgement.
Why is this in the culture war, you ask? Mostly because it represents another crack in the monolithic corporate-mass media culture that defined the United states from circa 1950 to 2010.
Leo Fender launched the Fender Electric Instrument Company in 1946, and created several iconic stringed instrument designs between 1950 and 1954, including the Telecaster guitar, Precision Bass, and Stratocaster guitar. The Stratocaster, in particular, set the musical world on fire due to its heavily contoured body, flexible pickup arrangement, and and tremolo bridge. Guitarists like Dick Dale, Jimi Hendrix, Eddie Van Halen, and Stevie Ray Vaughan took the instrument and created brand new, incredibly popular styles of music.
Things were going great for the strat, but the Fender Electric Instrument company wasn't having the best time. Leo Fender sold his interest in the company to the Columbia Records Distribution Corporation or CBS. Musicians derided instruments produced under the new ownership, and "pre-CBS" instruments developed a mystique that made them highly coveted prizes.
Eventually, CBS decided to unload the Fender brand, and a car dealership-turned private equity company called Servco Pacific Capital picked it up. This launched ushered in a cambrian explosion of product lines meant to ruthlessly segment the market into every possible price point. Around this time, Fender started running into a real problem. It turned out that other people could also make guitars. Japanese companies started undercutting Fender with clones of their most popular products. Some companies would attempt to double down on quality, but not Fender. Instead, they bought out the biggest clone company and rebranded them as their own "Squier" product line, turned to aggressive IP protection (securing a trademark on their headstock design in 1991), and engaged in a public marketing blitz to make sure that the musical community understood value of a Real Fender™ over an inferior clone. This worked pretty well for a while, but eventually Fender started seeing real competition from above and below. While they could buy out low-end competitors, all it did was incentivize more clone builders to spring up in countries across the world with cheap labor. Indonesia, Korea, Sri Lanka, and China all started cranking out Fender clones at a fraction of the prices Fender was charging. At the same time, "boutique" builders like Suhr started nibbling away at the high end. Fender started losing its mystique. When a $300 guitar with a $50 setup could rival a pre-CBS guitar for ergonomics and tone, enthusiastic amateurs stopped dreaming about the day that they could get a Real Fender™. Instead of shelling out for a Real Fender™, serious musicians (and rich guys) would go straight for the boutique builds instead.
The end result is that the Fender brand is a shadow of what it used to be, largely propped up by a shrinking-but-affluent market, while their leadership is either unwilling or unable to branch out.
The Stratocaster suit, in particular, offends me in a way that's somewhat hard to articulate. If you've ever built a slab-bodied instrument before, you start to realize that there are only so many ways to accomplish the task. If you want an instrument that's comfortable to play while sitting, you need to cut a contour that matches the curve of a person's thigh. If you want to play high notes, you need to cut material out below the neck. You need a projection above the neck to attach the strap at the instrument's balance point, but you don't want to add too much weight, which results in a "horn". You need room for electronics, and you probably want a contour at the top for comfort while playing as well. In the end, there are only a handful of designs that can flow from those requirements. Unless you're a psychopath like Ned Steinberger, whatever you build is probably going to end up looking similar to a strat.
Fender isn't the only company out there suffering from a similar malady. In fact, it's almost identical to the trajectory of the Harley Davidson corporation. Both became aspirational, iconic symbols of Americana. Both started banking on tradition and mystique, while trying and failing to hold back the tide by buying out competition (see: Buell). Both they eventually ended up trapped by their own early success.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, as I drive back and forth to band practice. I see far fewer motorcycles on the road than I did a decade ago. Musicians still exist, but the community of "instrument players" around me is going increasingly gray. Young people generally don't create music, or they stick to various flavors of electronica that they can produce on their own.
At the same time, the entire concept of "brand" has been eroding. In my youth, a brand generally traded on its reputation and relied on customer goodwill for its continued existence. Broadly speaking, 80s and 90s America trusted "brands". We hung out at the Dairy Queen. When somebody got a new guitar, we'd be excited to hear how that slick new Stratocaster sounded. A guy with a Harley was the coolest guy we knew. Craftsman tools were the last set you'd ever have to buy. Corporate consumer culture was mercantile, but at least it felt like you were getting something out of it.
In 2026, the American consumer/vendor relationship seems broken. Everything is owned by an increasingly small number of conglomerates who wear different skin suits to con suckers into buying from them, and not from those other guys, who are also them. It's starting to feel like a home-grown version of Chaebols, or Zaibatsu, and people are checking out.
This has has some real downstream effects. In a secular, essentially constructed nation like the US, the necessity of commerce and the prosperity that flows from it is one of the few universal experiences that citizens of this nation have. It feels like we're losing our lingua franca, however thin and materialistic it might be. At the same time, I can't tell what is cause and what is effect. Are the "lifestyle" companies all converging into a sleezy car dealer modality because it's efficient, or because Americans have stopped engaging with the idea of "lifestyle"? If it's the latter, is it because of a broader rejection of materialism, or because we're all fuckin' broke?
I don't think I have any answer to this, but if there's a moral to this story, maybe don't buy a Fender.
Another Intellectual Property disaster:
For the unfortunate fellows and fellas who aren't following the Italian brainrot universe, Tung Tung Tung Sahur is having legal issues (Fall Guys video for those illiterate or with short attention spans). Not one, but two companies are claiming to own the titular character, suing everyone including each other.
What's surprising about this case (to people who still believe in IP's integrity), neither company owns Mr. Sahur: AI-generated works are public domain in most countries including Indonesia (a draft regulation to change this has been proposed but not yet accepted), as they should be, in part because they themselves are trained on others' copyrighted data.
Yet the court case is delayed until October. In the meantime, he has been removed from the Roblox game Steal a Brainrot, played by over 25 million children and pedophiles (won't somebody think of the pedophiles?) This is no small drama: the game is so popular apparently a movie is being made about it, and by the time this is resolved, it may be too late to include him in the cast.
I just don't know how anyone can look at this and not feel...utterly dejected by the state of society. Copyright is a scourge, abused by large corporations and not actually benefiting small creators, and should be severely curtailed if not fully eliminated.
This sounds suspicious to me. I have no idea about Indonesia, but the usual criterion for copyright is creativity, not the tool. If you type a long prompt and then iterate and select after many generations, then it should be enough human creativity in there. And how the model creator got the training data should have no bearing on this. As long as it's not regurgitating a particular copyright protected character or image in that specific output, there should be no problem.
You didn't specify why any of these actors are claiming they own this character. That seems quite a big omission. If one of them is the original individual who used AI to make this character's image, then I'm actually on their side. It is a creative act to specify this nontrivial character form and presumably the prompt wasn't two or three words and they probably didn't pick the very first result.
At least in the United States, the specific rule is :
I don't know how well that will stand up to legal challenge. It's very rare to just give a prompt and get back a complex output. There's a lot of design, iteration, and thought.
Right. Generally, as I understand, copyright is very generous (when no AI is involved), in the sense that as long as you exercise the slightest creativity, they don't question stuff like "but you just randomly threw a pile of trash on the floor, that's not a sculpture" or "you just put a red square on white background, that's just geometry, not an art piece" etc. because that would kill a lot of contemporary "what even is art anyway" type of art.
So it seems like if you use a ControlNet, or any similar guidance, you're good for sure. But
Now if the user types "change the rhyme pattern to ... and make the lines shorter" and gets another poem fitting this requirement. Under the historical broad interpretation of "creativity" (which doesn't have to be impressive or painstakingly high effort), this would have to count as enough creative input I think.
Same with images. Today's AI chat apps can do iterative work on images that wasn't available in 2023 (when the doc was written), you could just re-generate with the same or a different prompt, but real editing wasn't possible. Today, you can tell ChatGPT what to change, and it will only change that part and keep the rest the same (as much as it can). So if you do 3 such iterations, each time specifically naming an aspect you want changed, that has to be enough... And what about selection? Is that exercise of creative judgment enough? Generate 10 Shakespeares and pick the one you like best? Based on the above text, I guess no. But what if you change your prompt inbetween?
I highly doubt the guy just sat down to the computer, typed out the perfect prompt for Tung Tung Sahur and got an image and he ran with that. He likely experimented with lots of weird and absurd character ideas and this one came out the funniest and he wrote and rewrote that prompt to make it maximally funny. It's absurd to deny him authorship for this.
That would be broadly my suspicion as well, with the caveat that the government and AI lobbyists may decide that the wind is blowing the wrong way and that some concessions on copyright may be needed to forestall serious rebellion/challenges to the training of AI as a whole.
Sorry I don't understand the polarity of which way you think it will go. You mean anti-AI people will get it their way and govt and pro-AI people will retreat, and refuse to grant "authorship" to AI-generated stuff, where AI-generated is broadly interpreted? Because that takes away the commercial value of AI art, hence AI art-making won't be profitable and hence not done, and hence human artists can keep making money?
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