alt Hacker News1) Fender got someone in Germany to buy a Strat type guitar from a Chinese vendor on Aliexpress and ship it to Germany (I assume this part)
2) Fender sued said small Chinese Aliexpress vendor in a regional German court for selling a "copied" design in Germany
3) The small Chinese guitar vendor didn't turn up, obviously
4) Fender got a default judgement that the S-type (Stratocaster etc.) guitar body shape (which has indisputably been in the public domain in the USA since 2009) is a "functional work of art" in which they have copyright.
5) Fender's weird law firm went on a rampage, in the EU and USA, using said default judgement as if it represents some kind of precedent, warning guitar firms (PRS included) and music retailers to stop selling them, recall and destroy their inventory on sale in the EU, and confirm they had done so, or be sued
6) guitar people, especially luthiers working in the USA who have solid reason to believe the S shape is public domain, took that about as well as you'd expect
7) Fender tried to walk it back, especially the bit about smashing perfectly good guitars
8) Thomann, based in Germany, certainly Fender's largest retailer outside the USA and one of the biggest music retailers in the world, have decided not to take it lying down.
Replies
This is extra bizarre to me, because for most purposes German law doesnt operate on a system of "legal precedent" the way countries which adopted the UK model do.
Am I missing something about Germany following a precedent system for patent/copyright or something, or is this even dumber than it sounds?
aliexpress? Thomann themselves are big in manufacturing guitars in china.
This really reads like some american lawyer used an llm and never questioned whether legal precedent is even a thing in germany aside from the highest courts.
Have seen several like this in the last months, though in much more niche areas and with barely any publicity.