Thomann has sued Fender in the Thomann Fender legal dispute after Fender sent cease-and-desist letters to manufacturers and retailers of S-style guitars across Europe and the US. The filing follows a May campaign that Thomann says reached its Harley Benton brand and other affected businesses.
Fender’s letters, sent through Bird & Bird, asked recipients to halt production and sales, recall guitars already sold and hand over customer and sales data. PRS and several smaller American luthiers publicly said they received one of the letters.
Edward “Bud” Cole in mid-June
Edward “Bud” Cole addressed the backlash in mid-June and said Fender was not suing anyone, only reaching out to a handful of businesses. He said the company was “the company wasn’t suing anyone, just reaching out to a handful of businesses.”
Thomann says it is standing up for Harley Benton and other companies caught in the letters. It also says it has carried Fender in its catalog for more than 70 years, and that many Thomann employees play Fender guitars themselves.
Düsseldorf Regional Court ruling
The dispute traces back to a default judgment from the Düsseldorf Regional Court in December 2025, which ruled that the Stratocaster’s body shape counts as a copyrighted work of applied art. The defendant in that case was a Chinese seller shipping nearly identical copies into Germany via AliExpress.
Thomann points to the 1954 launch of the Stratocaster and says the shape became successful because of its ergonomics. It also says the shape has long been considered public domain in the US, and cites Eddie Van Halen’s Frankenstrat as an example of free experimentation that led to the SuperStrat.
For sellers of S-style guitars, the immediate practical effect is the letter itself: stop production and sales, pull back products already sold, and hand over data. The next step in the Thomann Fender legal dispute is the court fight Thomann has now started; Fender’s response in court has not been laid out in the facts available here.
