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- Hacker News
- On a side note, think how conservative music world is, if people are still manufacturing and successfully sell guitar designed in 50s. You can probably take a 50s guitar and connect to a modern amp, or take a modern guitar and connect to a 50s amp and it will work.
Compare this, for example, to smartphone chargers or headphones and their compatibility.
by codedokode - why would the connector need to change? nothing has come out that's really better for analog signalsby nemomarx
- by BigTTYGothGF
- Sometimes engineers find the optimal or near optimal design early on in the life of a technology. Jet airplanes haven’t changed much since the 1960s.
- > You can probably
No need for "probably". That absolutely works.
by sampo - Oh yeah, you can plug a guitar made in the 50's to an amp that was made yesterday and vice versa with zero issues.by HardwareLust
- This is completely true, and there's a good reason.
Almost everything anyone has tried to do to modernize electric guitars in a non-compatible way has had big downsides.
Almost any guitar with a pre-amp or whatever built into it that would allow it to use a cable like an XLR cable ends up needing batteries in the guitar, which then introduce a maintenance/failure point. And very often efforts to introduce this stuff haven't sounded great.
The only place this has kind of changed is super high gain guitars for metal. They are more likely to use active pickups, they'll have a battery, but they still use standard cabling for compatibility.
Anything that is modernized ends up being more expensive and harder to work on yourself. A basic guitar like a Strat or Tele has incredibly simple electronics and is super easy for any guitar player to learn to fix themselves, and most of the parts inside are super cheap. And it all just works really well.
And the audience never cares, they care about the notes you choose to play and the message the musician cares to get across.
by ben7799 - Smartphone chargers had legitimate reason to change. Higher power, faster data, and we learned the hard way that micro usb and all the proprietary connectors before it were fundamentally physically flawed.
Audio hasn't changed at all in the last two centuries. An analog audio signal is fundamental physics and there's nothing to gain or change or improve in any meaningful sense. TRS/phono jacks likewise are just so brute force stupid and rugged that there was never a reason to change.
The connectors and interfaces never changed because the underlying signals never changed because there's nothing to change. Digial electronics on the other hand legitimately have gone through real and worthwhile changes, and been radically redefined many times in the last 60 years.
by vitally3643 - This one really bothers me:
Leo Fender himself declined to copyright the Strat body
Leo Fender himself sold "Strat clones" of the exact variety Fender Corp is trying to ban, after the sold the Fender name. I own one.
So Fender Corp is trying to retroactively assert that Leo Fender stole his own design from Fender Corp in 1979, they didn't have any issue for 47 years, but now because a Chinese company didn't show up in German court, they have eternal license to the design Leo Fender explicitly chose not to sell them.
Fuck Fender. My Jazz Bass is still my favorite instrument, I've had it 20 years and played hundreds of gigs, but I guess I'm never buying another
by queenkjuul - The problem is that after their original patent expired, they sat on their hands for too long. By the time they tried to trademark in 2008/2009, their bodies were considered generic in the US. Gibson, on the other hand, did what Fender should have done and applied for trademark (for their Les Paul body) back in the late 80s.
Now other brands are eating their lunch, and Fender is seemingly trying a last hail marry to get this settled. My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts.
by TrackerFF - "My guess is that if they manage to get a positive ruling in Europe, they'll somehow try to use that as case for US courts." That's exactly what they have done, they sued a Chinese company that was making knock-off Strat copies and selling them in Germany. Fender sued them, the Chinese company was a no show and Fender took that as a win to go after PRS who is selling a John Mayer Strat style guitar.by vondur
- 502 Bad Gateway, the HN kiss of death
Archive.org link: https://web.archive.org/web/20260624025836/https://www.thoma...
by sparkling - Works fine here…by eqvinox
- This makes me want to buy a new PRS. At Thomann.
- Recent and related:
Fender escalates legal campaign against S-style guitars - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48189539 - May 2026 (132 comments)
by dang - by altairprime
- Those who don’t know what this is about may appreciate Rick Beato’s (a guitar music vlogger) rant about itby jorisw
- And if somebody here doesn't follow his channel, he is the guy who does easily the best music interviews on YouTube.by pimeys
- I think this makes some excellent points.
In particular the cultural impact of the S-shape guitar has been enhanced by people playing non-Fender S-shapes.
Think Eddie van Halen on his Frankenstrat which has it's own Wikipedia entry and has been displayed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. That was probably a Charvel body.
That goes to the heart of the "work of applied art" argument.
by nl - This is a place where European copyright law is significantly different from US copyright law. In the US, copyright cannot cover a "functional part", which is why there is a third party auto parts industry. Improved functionality can be covered by a utility patent, but that lasts only 20 years. Designs can be protected by design patents, which last only 15 years. So in the US, any rights left in the form of the Stratocaster expired long ago.
US companies sometimes try to make "trade dress" or trademark claims, but that's much weaker than copyright.
by Animats - But technically the guitar does not have to have a shape of a strat. It could be any other shape, why not be creative and make your own design?by codedokode
- Fender has protected the strat design under the claim of "work of applied art" (https://spotlight.fender.com/newsroom/news/1004) which is also a concept in US copyright law, they just don't have a judgement for it etc. in their favour, unlike in Europe.by dwroberts
- I used to work for a Thomann competitor "Musicstore" in ~2005.
The server was some tower server in a back office with a note reminding everyone not to turn it off.
With Thoman being hugged to death right now I would like to think of there being a similar situation (its probably fine, but it made me feel nostalgic).
by normaler - Yeah sure biggest european music ecommerce store runs on tower server in a back office.by omnimus
- Similar work experience, I was with a CBS-owned music company that had a CNC machine with some old Fender Telecaster and Stratocaster body templates.
The hardware manager was cool and would let employees turn slabs of wood into Tele- and Strat-style bodies after hours.
When the Fender/German court ruling came down, my first thought was: Fender has had roughly 70 years with the Stratocaster design, and the broader industry has been making S-style guitars for decades.
Surely at some point a body shape becomes generic, right?
by matchagaucho - I still think this whole Fender-suing-everyone thing will end up with Thomann owning them either partially or completely.
But the weird German lawsuit was always about the fact that some private equity suits (or bad Hawaiian shirts, it seems) are upset that Thomann (and others) sell the PRS Silver Sky, which as they have probably deduced from the reverb.com data they now own, likely outsells equivalent Fender models by some margin.
So I think Thomann are just bringing it on.
And they aren't the only ones: LSL hired the lawyer who won the judgement that put the S-type body shape in the public domain in 2009.
by dofm - Thomann own an extremely popular brand, Harley Benton, which (obviously) sells S-types.
I think it’s more likely that this is about the ST series than about the Silver Sky.
by d1sxeyes - German lawsuits are far less expensive than … what we learn from huge american lawsuits in tv. Unlikely that Thomann will make piles of money. It‘s more about the right to keep selling those guitars and quite some marketing impact.by borlox
- Apparently Fender got bought up by a private equity fund, Servco Pacific Capital. Who would have guessed.by vintermann
- The real change is that the private equity owners also recently bought reverb.com, and must've seen the numbers showing that people aren't buying as many new fenders as they are other brands, and because the only thing they know how to do is extract money from people by destroying rather than creating, they went down this super obvious PE playbookby dkuntz2