The problem for Fender, IMO, is their legal efforts are about 70 years late; too late.
Fender winning in the courts is a longshot; if they do win it will be challenged.
Fender's original creations and designs were so good that they inadvertently / unintentionally created an entire industry dedicated to creating copies (of varying degrees of similarity) and derivatives and got little or nothing for it. They realized the situation too late. Depending on courts / legal system to do the right thing is a roll of the dice.
70 years (even longer for the Telecaster) of copies and derivatives - that genie isn't going back in the bottle. No amount of legal wrangling is going to magically fix Fender's predicament.
Unfortunately for FMIC, their executive management is, obviously, not very smart; well, at least not as smart as their law firm that convinced them they had a case, and to spend likely millions of dollars with their law firm, destroy goodwill in the market (goodwill is an intangible asset), and eventually lose in court. Millions of dollars wasted, that could have been spent on actually improving quality, operations, designs, innovations, efficiency, etc.
I don't know where Fender found their CEO, but I wouldn't hire him to clean the bathrooms at a fast food franchise. That goes for any and all board / c-level execs at FMIC and any parent company who agreed to this course of action.
The stupidity of Fender executive management is an embarrassment. It's like they looked at Gibson's Play Authentic and said hold my wine cooler.
Maybe the damage this does to FMIC will wake up whomever owns it, and they revamp Fender into an actual functioning musical instrument company again...most likely they'll run it into the ground, squeezing every last penny from their investment as they force it to die a slow, painful, ignominious death.
SMH
