So Many Fender Bass Copies

[3below]

[quote name='Twincam' timestamp='1461004785' post='3030589']
To be honest I hate the fact it's a copied design most basses out there look the bloody same because of it.
And I dislike all these pseudo "custom" basses that look pretty much like a p or jazz apart from the headstock. Try coming up with something original eh!
It's fair enough pickup placement and other essential hardware bits, but having the near enough the same body shape, the same pick guard and control plate etc is so boring.
The only basses that should resemble a p bass or jazz is a Fender or Squire.
[/quote]

Agree that many basses look the same. Once you start building a 'two horn' type bass everything looks a bit similar in the body department. It is a case of function over form. Another example (loosely) is the Gibson Thunderbird shape which could conceivably be traced back to the Telecaster - just 'push' the upper body back.

[tauzero]

[quote name='3below' timestamp='1461009418' post='3030655']


Agree that many basses look the same. Once you start building a 'two horn' type bass everything looks a bit similar in the body department. It is a case of function over form. Another example (loosely) is the Gibson Thunderbird shape which could conceivably be traced back to the Telecaster - just 'push' the upper body back.
[/quote]

The Les Paul is rather more like the Tele - a singlecut but attractive rather than gopping like a Tele.

[TrevorR]

[quote name='Twincam' timestamp='1461004785' post='3030589']
To be honest I hate the fact it's a copied design most basses out there look the bloody same because of it.
And I dislike all these pseudo "custom" basses that look pretty much like a p or jazz apart from the headstock. Try coming up with something original eh!
It's fair enough pickup placement and other essential hardware bits, but having the near enough the same body shape, the same pick guard and control plate etc is so boring.
The only basses that should resemble a p bass or jazz is a Fender or Squire.
[/quote]

It is purely down to economics and what will sell most. After all, these are big companies who are chasing profits and shareholder dividends. The fact is that taken across the market at any particular price/quality point X, if you have a catalogue dominated by Jass and Recision basses which clone the classics you will sell more units than if you have a catalogue dominated by individualistic looking basses which deviate from the norm. In some ways we should be thankful that some manufacturers do choose to exploit the niches of the market place where folks are looking for something a bit more individual rather than simply going for a safe lowest common denominator.

It's like mass market magazine covers. Why do similar types of magazine all look the same? Because they gravitate towards what they know sells. I recall David Hepworth and Marc Ellen chatting about this on a Word podcast once. They said that the sad fact was that if they had yet another cover with Springsteen, Bowie, Lennon, Dylan etc on it they would probably sell out of that issue. If they had put on Rickki Lee Jones or Toumani Diabaté (of whom Hepworth was a huge, huge fan) on the cover they would end up with a warehouse full of unsold returns at the end of the month.

[mcnach]

[quote name='wateroftyne' timestamp='1460901318' post='3029628']
Incidentally, you know why the headstock is the shape it is?

Ol' Leo wasn't daft when it came to saving a dollar or two....


[/quote]


aha!

[JapanAxe]

Unfortunately the terms 'copyright', 'trade mark', 'design', and 'patent' get thrown around as though they were interchangeable. To understand how they work in the UK, toddle off to the [url="https://www.gov.uk/government/organisations/intellectual-property-office"]Intellectual Property Office[/url].

I dare say the US situation is slightly different...

[discreet]

[quote name='Grangur' timestamp='1460910229' post='3029715']
[color=#282828][font=helvetica, arial, sans-serif]Anyone could open a new company tomorrow called Microsoft, making a range of small sofas and upholstery and the IT group in the USA wouldn't be able to stop you. When you register the trademark you have to do so in each and every country you want it to apply for. You also have to define the business you're going to trade in.[/font][/color]
[/quote]

That's interesting. Incidentally, if Microsoft did build furniture, it would be badly thought-out, take up far too much room, be incompatible with your existing furniture and come bundled with a load of rubbish you didn't want.

Edited April 19, 2016 by discreet

[Bassassin]

[quote name='luckydog' timestamp='1460980638' post='3030309']
P- and J-Bass copies are sometimes referred to as from/before 'the lawsuit years', which AFAIK was sometime in the 70s and concerned some very good guitars from Japan. Some of them go for a decent price now and by accounts play and sound very well.

Presumably the lawsuits had some basis, so some form of protection must have existed then I suppose ?

LD
[/quote]

This "lawsuit" thing.

What actually happened was that Norlin, the then-parent company of Gibson, decided to commence legal action against Elger Hoshino, the US arm of Hoshino Gakki, owner of the Ibanez brand. This was a response to the use of Gibson's trade dress headstock profile on Ibanez Les Paul copies, and other Gibson-based designs in the Ibanez range.

The action commenced in June 1977, and this is the letter sent out to their dealer network at the time:

[url="http://s1276.photobucket.com/user/LanterneRouge/media/Random/lawsuitletter_zpszdod2dkk.jpg.html"][/url]

The proposed court case never actually took place, because Hoshino had changed the headstock shape of their range of Gibson copies to a non-infringing design a year earlier, in mid - 1976. The litigation was only aimed at the headstock, as the other design features were presumably regarded as generic.

So there are no actual "Lawsuit" guitars - and the only ones that the term can loosely be applied to are pre '76 Ibanez-branded Gibson copies. If you're not going to be quite that pedantic, then "lawsuit era" covers that whole 1970 - 1977-ish period.

Although no-one actually got sued, the whole thing stirred up the Japanese & Korean guitar industry, headstock designs were changed across the board (even lowly Hondos) and the "quality" brands ditched their copy ranges overnight. The likes of Ibanez & Aria had been tentatively marketing original designs for a few years already, and these became the mainstay of their output. Even budget brands upped their game and weren't scared of building interesting instruments that weren't US-brand clones.

I suppose that was the birth of the "proper" Japanese guitar industry - budget copy manufacture moved to cheaper sources like Korea & Taiwan, and by the early 80s, everyone seemed to be playing MIJ Ibanez, Aria Pro, Yamaha, Washburn etc originals.

J.

[tauzero]

There was one victim of an almost-lawsuit - Beater stopped production when Fender went after them.