feresigma.blogg.se

The lawsuit was settled out of court but this hastened Ibanez’s move towards their own style,ultimately  leading to them becoming one of the world’s largest guitar makers. In 1977 Gibson’s parent company Norlin launched a lawsuit against Elger/Ibanez citing the blatant copies of Gibson headstock designs, even though by now Ibanez had started moving into more original styles. Other, less obvious copy choices were made, like the Plexiglas Ampeg Dan Armstrong. The American companies whose designs were copied didn’t become serious about dealing with the Japanese companies until the late 1970s, as Ibanez in particular made copies of many Gibson models, including the SG Junior, Flying V and Firebird as well as the obvious Les Paul copy. These were high-quality and looked too close for comfort to the real thing. However, in the 1970s things began to get more serious, not only when bootleg Mosrites were made, with companies even attempting to pass themselves off as the American brand, but also when Aria and Ibanez, companies making electric guitars since the mid-1960s, began to make copies of Gibson designs. Rose Morris was a London guitar shop which imported Guyatone guitars into Britain to be sold, while Dallas-Arbiter was a distributor of musical equipment, responsible for the iconic Fuzz Face fuzz pedal used by Jimi Hendrix.

Notable makers of these guitars are the now long defunct Guyatone, whose guitars were notably sold by Rose Morris, and Teisco, as sold by Dallas-Arbiter. The Japanese guitar industry before 1970 had been cheap, low-quality guitars, usually made of plywood, many short-scale, with 19 or 20 frets instead of the accepted 21 or over, and mostly exported to other countries to be sold by different companies.  The story of the Japanese guitar industry in the 1970s, and why it is so important, is worth telling in more detail.

In our series of articles on vintage Japanese collectible guitars you’ll have come across the “Japanese copy boom” of the 1970s. Fender have appealed the decision, so this matter has yet to reach its conclusion. Apparently failure to enforce one’s trademark on something can lead to the removal from the Trademark register after a certain period of time on the grounds of “non-use”.