Copyright fights in 2026: Fender's Stratocaster, Huawei's dome and a Minions reprieve

Thomann, the world's largest music retailer, filed suit against Fender this month over the cease-and-desist letters the guitar maker has been sending to companies it believes are copying the Stratocaster body shape. Guitar World reported the action on 22 June. The retailer's own in-house brand, Harley Benton, received one of those letters. Thomann is now the first firm to take Fender to court in the dispute.

The legal foundation for Fender's campaign sits in Dusseldorf, where in March the Regional Court issued a default ruling that granted, in the words of Guitar World's account, "enforceable rights against any guitars using the Stratocaster body shape" in the EU. Two months later Fender sent cease-and-desist letters to several firms, among them family-owned LsL Instruments and PRS Guitars. Thomann says it is acting for other brands too, naming Tyler, Tom Anderson, Suhr, LsL, Maybach, Pensa, FGN and PRS as companies it believes are now exposed. The stakes are high for all of them.

"After careful consideration, we have decided to take legal action," a statement on the Thomann blog reads. "We have done so because we are convinced that the questions raised here go far beyond a mere legal dispute and affect the future of diversity, innovation and competition in our industry."

Thomann's argument follows the line already taken by industry lawyer Ronald Bienstock: that the Stratocaster is not a copyrightable work of art, and that its design and commercial success rest on ergonomics rather than protected authorship. That is the same reasoning the Dusseldorf court is said to have applied, and it is why, in Thomann's telling, so many variations of the instrument exist. The retailer was founded in 1954, the same year Fender launched the Stratocaster, and it has carried the brand for more than 70 years. Many of its staff play Fender guitars, the company says. That history is part of why the cease-and-desist wave landed badly. "We used to be a small music store ourselves and know exactly where we have come from," CEO Hans Thomann said. "Diversity, fairness and respectfully dealing with each other have always been part of our philosophy. Many of those affected do not have the financial and legal means to conduct such a legal dispute. We therefore see it as our responsibility to have this matter clarified in court not only for our own company, but for all parties involved."

Fender has framed its actions as "working directly with companies to find practical paths forward", according to Guitar World. The company has also drawn public criticism from prominent YouTubers, some of whom have cut ties with it. Thomann's statement ends with a direct request: that Fender stop issuing cease-and-desist demands against manufacturers, distributors and dealers and return to what it calls a fair, cooperative partnership.

Elsewhere, the same script with different props

The Stratocaster fight is one of several copyright disputes that have moved through courts and negotiating tables over the past two years. They differ in subject matter, from animated films to stained glass to legal databases, but the mechanics repeat: a rights holder asserts control, a user or competitor pushes back, and the outcome turns on how a court reads the scope of protection.

Take the Olympic ice. The Spanish figure skater Tomàs-Llorenç Guarino Sabaté learned late last week that the short program he had skated all season, built around music from the Minions films, would not be cleared for the Milano Cortina Winter Games. The Guardian reported on 3 February that he had submitted the music through the International Skating Union's recommended clearance process months earlier and had competed with it without issue, including at last month's European championships in Sheffield.

Universal then reversed course. "Huge THANK YOU to everyone who reposted, shared and supported. Because of you Universal Studios reconsidered and officially granted the rights for this one special occasion," Guarino Sabaté wrote on Instagram. He added that a couple of things still had to be tied up with the other two pieces of music in the program. The skater, a six-time Spanish national champion, is set to make his Olympic debut in the men's singles event, scheduled to begin on 10 February at the Milano Ice Skating Arena.

The case is not isolated. The Guardian noted that Canadian ice dancers Marie-Jade Lauriault and Romain Le Gac learned late last year that two Prince songs planned for their 1990s-themed rhythm dance could not be cleared for Olympic use, despite being approved during the rest of the season. At the Beijing Olympics in 2022, American pairs champions Alexa Knierim and Brandon Frazier faced a copyright lawsuit over a cover of House of the Rising Sun; the case settled privately for an undisclosed sum understood by the Guardian to be around $1.4m. The ISU's director-general, Colin Smith, described the underlying problem to the Guardian as structural: "the music industry has no common clearance platform".

Domes, databases and diaries

Design disputes tend to move slower. The Canadian glass artist Victoria Balva wrote in January 2025 about a stained and leaded glass skylight being built for Huawei's headquarters in Shenzhen. A rendering of the skylight, she said, looked very similar in details and structure to some of her own domes and ceilings. She wrote to Nikken, the Japanese architectural and interior design firm on the project. After an exchange of letters, Nikken conducted an internal investigation and accepted that its employee had looked at her designs while working on the project, she wrote. A Toronto lawyer was appointed to handle the case.

Balva listed projects she said inspired the sketch, among them a New Haven dome from 2017, a Bridle Path skylight from 2012 and a Waterloo dome from 2016. She later received a drawing of a proposed new design, which she confirmed no longer looked similar to her work, though she noted a couple of minor elements remained. She wrote that the case had not been fully resolved and that four months of her professional life were taken away.

Two settlements show the other end of the spectrum. In March, the Canadian Legal Information Institute and Vancouver-based AI startup Caseway AI announced they had resolved a lawsuit CanLII filed in November 2024 in the British Columbia Supreme Court, alleging Caseway built a business by taking CanLII's work through a bulk and systemic download without permission or compensation. BetaKit reported the terms are confidential. Caseway CEO Alistair Vigier had said in January that the parties had resolved the major issues. CanLII's blog post said each side would move forward independently.

And in the Netherlands, a copyright fight over the Anne Frank manuscripts has reached the Court of Justice of the European Union. TorrentFreak reported in September 2024 that the Dutch Supreme Court referred three questions to the CJEU about geo-blocking, VPNs and what counts as a communication to the public under Article 3(1) of the Copyright Directive. The Anne Frank Fonds argues that because VPNs can bypass blocking, the manuscripts should not be published online at all. The lower court and the appeal court both dismissed that argument. The answers, when they come, will shape how streaming services and publishers across Europe handle geographical licences.

None of these cases share a doctrine. They share a pattern: rights get asserted, and the cost of testing them lands on whoever cannot afford to wait. Fender's campaign may be the clearest example yet, because the product at issue, a bolt-on electric guitar with two cutaways, has been copied, modified and sold by hundreds of builders for seven decades. Whether that history makes the shape unprotectable or merely well loved is now a question for a courtroom.