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The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office reached a decision on March 25, regarding a body-shape appeal involving Fender Musical Instruments vs.Stuart Spector Designs, U.S. Music Corporation, ESP Guitars, Sadowsky Guitars, Lakland Musical Instruments, Peavey Electronics, Warmoth Guitar Products, Schecter Guitar Research, Michael Tobias, and others.

The Board stated that, “Fender refers to the ‘iconic’ status of these [instrument] outlines in American popular culture; however, we must resolve a narrow issue: Do consumers associate these two-dimensional outlines, depicted in the drawings, as indicators of source? …We conclude that applicant [Fender] has not established acquired distinctiveness such that these two-dimensional outlines of guitar bodies, standing alone, serve to indicate source.”

After five years of hard-fought litigation, which included over twenty thousand pages of evidence demonstrating countless companies who have manufactured, marketed and sold guitars that use the body shapes that Fender sought to trademark, the TTAB concluded, “The evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that these configurations are so common in the industry that they cannot identify source. In fact, in the case of the [Stratocaster] body outline, this configuration is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in a dictionary.” The entire decision can be read at: http://ttabvue.uspto.gov/ttabvue/v?pno=91161403&pty=OPP&eno=246.