The Future of Originality Online

On the Shay, we're gonna to talk about guitars. But don't worry if guitars aren't your thing because we're also gonna talk about Lulu lemon and lip gloss and ugs and recipes and Doritos and Oreos in the island of Santorini. Do any of those speak to you? Have you figured out what the show's about yet It's about It used to be kind of embarrassing to own a fake. Maybe you didn't want your friends to know that your parents bought you store brand fruit loops or maybe your parents didn't want their friends to know that that wasn't real Louis V. But not anymore. We don't even really use the word fake anymore. We use the word dupe and everyone's getting into the duplication game. And some brands like Fender are fighting back. The impact of this could be nuclear It could be absolutely catastrophic for the guitar industry as a whole. And we're going to see how that's going for them on today exxplain from Vox. Ppport for this show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. With deep research Claud's research capabilities go way deeper than basic web search, comprehensive reliable analysis with proper citations Turning hours of research into minutes for problems worth solving, you can get started with claud at claud. a slash today exxplain. That's claud. ai slash today explained Support for today explain comes from Fetch Fetch is pet insurance if you hadn't figured it out. Do you have a pet According to a study from a pet insurance company from a few years ago, every six seconds a pet owner in the US Hit bill over a thousand dollars and it almost never comes at a convenient time So check out Fetch. you get paid up to ninety percent of vet bills. you can use Fetch for any vet in the U.S and Canada. Every vet is in network. Go to fetch com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet. com slash save Today Explained is here with friend of the show Charlie Harding, host, a co host of the Switched on pop podcast, which if you're not listening to, why? Why? Charlie, We're here to talk to you about guitars and it turns out you're surrounded by guitars. Is there a feender Stratocaster back there? I think rightight over my head. Yeah. I got a feender Stratocaster, feender teelecaster. You are clearly a guitar player. Yes. And there is a fight right now in guitar world Tell us about the fight. It's guitar battle So Fender who are known for making the famed stratocaster guitar have recently been issuing cease and desist letters to other guitar builders, telling them You gott to stop producing guitars that look like our stratocasters. Fender fired shots yesterday. todayod they just launched a full scale invasion. I got a letter here, a copy of a cease and desist letter that a U.S boutique guitar builder received Three days ago. Basically it says, Dear Sves are Madams, we're writing to you in the name and on behalf of Findnder Musical Instruments Corporation. Our clients has claims against you to cease and desist from further marketing such guitars, disclosure of information. They're asking guitar manufacturers to recall their models, to destroy these instruments. Multiple boutique guitar builders here in the US Receive virtually identical legal demands from fender lawyers, stop making guitars, stop shipping guitars Destroy all your guitars and send us a bunch of money. And this has blown up back in Fender's face as guuitar YouTube, which basically controls all of guitar culture has had a major backlash saying, Fender, you have no right to claim this stratocaster guitar shape belongs to all of us. This is a PR disaster that will hurt you and haunt you, Fender for years. There's so much musical DNA in that stratocaster shape that it almost stopped being a guitar design and became the default image of electric guitar itself For people who don't know, I mean, the stratocast or guitar shape Ionic, literally the guitar emoji on your telephone is the Fender Statocaster guitar. When you think electric guitar, you probably picture a stratocaster. The Fender Stratocaster with its two bullhorns and its shapely ergonomic body, that's what we think of when we think electric guitar probablyrobably first saw it in the hands of Buddy Holly. David Gilmore her Pomarello Mark Kopler. The edge Steve Lacy Buddy guy. please people Jerry Garcias. I think really in many ways, the Fender Stratocaster was made to be interpret it, if you will A Leo Fender, who developed the stratocaster was really inspired by Ford's manufacturing practices of modular, easy to repair guitars. So rather than like gluing on the neck, which he can't take off easily, he decided, whyy don't we bolt the neck on And basically the entire Fender Stratocaster is built to be modified So when you picture Jimy Hendrix, he's playing an upside downs strate to cast. When you picture Eddie Van Halen He's ripped out the pickups, put his own pickups in, he has painted the body, made it his own. People are constantly trying to make this guitar their own sound. so Manufacturers, whether boutique or other big guitar makers have also tried to make S style, stratocaster style guitars because again, it is the guitar that people think of when they think the electric and it's so modifiable I went to Timu. com for the first time my life actually and they had me put a bunch of like deer in the right direction as like a human verification thing, veryery cool website. Yeah. And then I typed in guitar. And guess what came up? A guitar that looks identical, Charlie to a offender strratocaster and it's fifty three dollars and forty nine cents. Surely this is a thing Fender is worried about, right? Because I'm guessing there is no feender stratocaster that costs fifty three dollars and forty nine cents The strratocaster was first developed in nineteen fifty four, Fender didn't start trying to claim its trademark over the body shape until two thousand three. They were denied the right to the ownership of that body shape in two thousand nine. Applicant has failed to establish that configurations involved in the applications before us have acquired distinctivenessark trial and Aeal board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled that The guitar shape had undergone genericization Basically It is now Everybody's shape This configuration is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in the dictionary All the same, Fender recently said, you know what? We're going give this another try. So tell us about this recent attempt by this iconic brand to protect its iconic guitar So Fender recently had a court ruling in Dosoldorf, Germany. They saw that there was a Chinese company selling fake stratocasters on Ali Express. If you don't know what Alixpress is, it's like this You know, basically Dirt cheap Chinese you knock offs of everything under the sun. So they had Stratocasers on they ordered one It was shipped to Germany. So then they were like, okay, they ship this guitar to Germany. We established that they do ship here. Eendnder won a lawsuit by default judgment They brought a lawsuit against a Chinese Ali Express seller of sixty euros Strapp lease and The Ali Express seller didn't show up to court and it was copyright grounds where they really pitched the idea heavily that the fender strat is this artistic piece This Dusodorf court says that the stratocaster design qualifies as a copyrighted work of applied art under German and European law. Wow. And using this ruling, Fender says, well, we own this iconic strratocaster body design shape, which the US had said, No, you don't. So Fender turns around and says, Great, we own this shape in Germany and the EU. And so they turn around and start issuing these cease and desist letters. They say basically, you got to destroy those guitars and stop selling that Charlie, dare I ask why is Fender pursuing this claim? In Germany of all places in any legal case, you're always looking for the court which is going to side with, you know, your claim and Germany and European intellectual property laaw are partarticularly favorable to product design intellectual property cases The Europeans definitely do it differently. They make different kinds of decisions than US. courts are going to. And is the argument they're making in this court in Dusldorf essentially the argument that you said they started making in the early ots, which is that this is our baby, this is our whole thing. this is our bread and butter Back off the rest of you guitar manufacturers? Yeah, I mean, it's a reasonable claim to make. their biggest competitor, Er Gibson has a famous guitar called the Les Paul and they were given a right to the silhouette of that body that says that only Gibson can make the silhouette of that Les Paul. And so It's reasonable that Fender would say, well, what about our guitar shape I mean, frankly The electric guitar, it doesn't really matter what the shape of the body is. Unlike the acoustic guitar where the body shape really matters But the electric guitar, you can kind of make it look like anything. That's why you have these like crazy V shaped guitars. or these wild, you know metal guitars with sharp points all over the place. So yeah, if Gibson can claim that they own a body shape and they were granted the right to it in nineteen ninety three, then Fender, I think, reasonably would pursue the same thing. Okay, you're using words like reasonable, like fair with regard to what Fender is pursuing in this court in Dusldorf regarding dupes from China And yet yeah the whole reason we're here is because pursuing this case in Germany Fender Ruffles feeathers, the world over Tell us about how that happens. People are upset that Fender has made this aggressive legal claim. Fucking bullshit corporate ass fucks. This is not the way to do it, Fender to publicly go after small builders so that you can monopolize the stratocaster. In my opinion, that's what this reads as. So you won a case in Dusldorf Cool, I'm glad you won, but to turn that into This letter that is drraconian and unfair and turns you into this biggest bully in the world Where did That lead They went after a lot of different manufacturers, not just this one from China. know, the guitar manufacturing industry, some of it are big players Other guitar manufacturers are small boutique companies run by just a couple of people So I think a lot of guitar fans have felt that you know, Fendnder is trying to take something away not just from the big guys, but also the little ones Was this inevitable for Fender? Was this something they had to do to protect their bottom line? I think's like it's the predictable corporate act. That's what you're gonna do. It's like, this is our intellectual property. Don't take it. even though, you know, I think a lot of musicians would like to believe that You know, music is meant to be free It's meant for everybody, it's for sharing. It's for our deepest emotions. And when art and commerce intersect Things get messy We're gonna talk about the rest of the dupes and if anything's original anymore, when todayoday Explained is back. Supp for todayoday Explain comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels hand crafted but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts hosting and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. Agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections, then you review and publish what goes live. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams and businesses that want a professional site and care enough to get every detail right. Agents solve the gap between AI generated ideas and production ready website work The aggent works in the same place where the real site is designed, managed, reviewed, and published. 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That's shipstation dot com code today, shipstation dot com code today, taxes and fees applied Today Explaine is back with Mia Sato, who's a senior reporter at the Verge and recently wrote about dupes Mia, I wonder, are we like at peak dupe right now? I think we might be. We could probably Surmise that there will be even more dupes in the future, but definitely I think there are more dupes than have ever existed in the history of mankind right now. Yeah exactly. It could get worse depending on whether you think it's a bad thing to begin with, but we can get into that. Let's talk about dupe culture. I mean, for all the people out there who just buy the name brand product every time, do those people exist? Maybe, what exactly is dupe culture? What has it become culture is this idea that the limitlessness of the internet allows you to find a cheaper alternative, a copy, something that is a reasonable stand in for the thing that you actually want, and it has permeated every industry guitars, right Cot If you wna look expensive but not spend a lot of money, this is the video for you makeup. I'm doing a full phase of drugstore dupes that are just as good, if not better than their luxury counterparts. Food. You've heard of Doritos, Lunchlely, and Oreos, but I bet you haven't heard of Ditos, Lunchlely, or boreos. In this video, recipes I'm going to show you guys how to make Copeecat Outback steakhouse finined dip. There are dupes for our Lulu Lemon pants. I saved four hundred twenty three dollars by shopping the Amazon Lulu Lemon dupe instead of going to Lulu Lemon. So you know why we're here today? Lulu Lemon has sued Costco for selling dupes, so we've gott to check them out. These ones are thirty dollars and the ones from Lulu Lemon are literally one hundred and something There are dupes for Birken bags, which are incredibly expensive, incredibly hard to purchase designer handbags that go for Tens of thousands of dollars that there was like a fifty dollars version for sale at Walmart. It was called The Workin All right, my wall n working is here This is not just the workkin bag, it is my Tirkin bag. There are dupes for fancy pots and pans. There are dupes for lip glosses and lip oils and lip stains. There are dupes for vacations. Someone was marketing a different island as a dupe of Santorini, right? So you can kind of apply this dupe framing to just about anything What's different now is that dupes are kind of just a way of life. in that you don't have to go to somewhere kind of seedy or weird or you black markety to get a dupe Uh, anything you can think of Dup culture means that there's a dup out there of it somewhere. But it's walking a line, being very careful not to infringe on things like trademark or copyright. And how do you find your dupes? Do you just go to dupe. com Dupe. com is the thing. Dupe. com basically you can opy and paste a URL to any product W I'll get into dup. com and it will do a reverse image search of the web and find products that look similar. Some of them might be cheaper, some of them might be expensive. But the whole idea is you're looking for lookal liikes. The thing is a lot of contemporary modern online shopping actually has all the tools you need to find a dupe built into the features. So Amazon, for example, just introduced a new feature where you can Write out a text version of what you're looking for I'm looking for a red crop top with ruffle sleeves. and it will use AI to generate an image of what it thinks you're describing and then use that AI generated image to look for similar products So it's basically like a reverse image search. TikTok has a feature where if you pause a video, it will highlight products in the video and you can click those products and find similar looking dupes on TikTok shop. So finding dupes has never it's never been easier because a lot of these features are built into the platforms that we're using in the first place When you talk about just typing in a URL or copying and pasting a URL more likely into dup. com or all these reverse image searches Where do we end up on the legality I mean, that's sort of the million billion dollar question, which is like, What is allowed Obviously I'm not a lawyer, but when IP attorneys describe this to me, Every like every question I would ask them, they're kind of like, it depends When you get ted to something like fashion One, you know expert told me that like a lot of it is not protectable This shirt that I'm wearing, right? It's like a button down shirt with a lace pattern. No one should be able to own that specific thing Just because a fast fashion company if they were to rip this off, like Is there legal grounds to sue them? Maybe not Just because two products look the same doesn't necessarily mean that it's illegal. There was a recent case that was kind of, you know quite influential because it was one of the first dupe cases to my understanding. but The creator of the Ug boot went after a dupe. So UG has been trying to sue Quinince for making cheaper dupes that look exactly like the silhouette that they claim to be theirs. And the court said to Ug, I don't care how many you've sold or how well you've branded the silhouette It's too general for you to claim it as yours. The jury found that the designs were similar, but they invalidated the design pent at Dcker. And what the jury found was, yes, the product, the dupe looked substantially similar to the original Ug boot, to the patent, the design patent that Ug had but that the UG patent in the first place maybe should not have been issued, that it wasn't unique enough. And so that's where all of these questions get really muddy, right? Even if you have a design patent for a product Is it like viable And it can turn people against you, right? Be I guess people feel like they can rip off feender because offenders the biggest fish and peopleeople feel like they can rip off ugs because for like a decade It was like the boots to have and it doesn't feel like they're struggling. Is that a part of this like broader dupe culture that may or may not be peeking right now The public's engagement with Duke culture is endlessly fascinating to me because people have a lot of thoughts and Often the thoughts are around Of course, I'm going to buy a dupe of a Birken because I can't afford a fifty thousand dollars handbag. And if there's a cheaper alternative, well, I'm just going to buy that because now, you know, poor people deserve nice things too or I shouldn't have to be mega wealthy to afford a bag that I like And that thinking often colors the duep discourse. Now that we can't afford. I think're romanticizing the idea of dupes because like we wouldn't have money to buy the real thing anyway. I hit the bullet and I fought He's tavy dues Aazon. And know it gets messy and it gets really heated and emotional, I think, because we're talking about something that Americans love to do, which is consume, which is shop. And people get really defensive and protective of what they are able to buy and sort of like the morality of dupes Bying dupes is bad karma. Time has come for us to all collectively stop buying into dupe culture. I saw a video today that a creator posted saying R to Kmart and buy this top. It is a dupe for this with consideration top. With consideration if you don't know is a small Australian business. I want to know you why Gen Z care about everything other than counterfeits I sort of think is never enough This is my hot take, but I think when you have a dupe, you still lust over the product it's stooping. And in that way It's actually making them even more aspirational . I think that modern online shopping has kind of lied to consumers and almost like rewired our brains to make us think that there is such a thing that costs five dollars and will last a really long time and is ethically made and looks good And I think often that is not the case. And often that's what dupes are Right? They kind of give you the illusion of finding something nice or finding something beautiful or something that you feel, you know you identify with But when you strip away a lot of it It's a lie You kind of you get what you pay for And the cost of things has gone down so much, especially since like, you know, Timu and Xian, these ultra fast fashioned brands. that I think consumers have kind of forgotten What is literally possible when it comes to like cheap and good products? I think cheap and good products do still exist Be.