Deep Dive: The Lawsuit Era and Rickenbacker
Copies, trademarks, and a lawsuit that wasn’t
Did you realize that the lawsuit that gave the “Lawsuit Era” its name never actually went to trial?
In 1977 Norlin, Gibson’s parent company, sued Ibanez over their use of Gibson’s “open-book” headstock. That case was settled out of court, yet it became attached to an entire generation of Japanese-made guitars—many of which were made long before the lawsuit was filed, and many more after.
“Lawsuit Era” is a convenient misnomer. It’s a shorthand we all use to describe a period when Japanese manufacturers went from building inexpensive copies of American guitars to building instruments that could compete with—and in some cases surpass—the originals they were copying. The lawsuit is part of that story, but only a small part. So what really are Lawsuit Era guitars, and what was the Lawsuit Era itself?
And before you ask, while yes, we tend to picture Fender and Gibson copies when we think of the Lawsuit Era, there were also Rickenbacker copies—some of them shockingly good. Nothing like today’s cheap Chinese-made “Chickenbacker” counterfeits. These guitars proudly wore their own brand names on their headstocks and made no attempt to pass themselves off as genuine Rickenbackers. They were simply well-made, reasonably priced replicas of guitars that people actually wanted.
Which is why, ironically, Lawsuit Era Rickenbacker bass copies abound, while guitar copies are comparatively rare: the peak of the Lawsuit Era aligns almost perfectly with the nadir of demand for Rickenbacker guitars.
But before we talk about the history of the Japanese guitar industry and the rise of the Lawsuit Era, we should have a brief conversation about intellectual property. Because if you think that questions about what is and is not protected were settled during the Lawsuit Era, Fender’s attorneys would like to have a word.
Broadly speaking, there are four basic pillars of protection of intellectual property: patents, trademarks, trade dress, and copyrights.
A patent protects an invention, and grants its creator exclusive rights to that invention for a fixed period of time. When a patent application is filed, the Patent Office asks three basic questions: Is it new? Is it non-obvious? And is it useful? If the answer to all three is yes, a patent is generally granted.
Plenty of things that are just part of the electric guitar landscape today began life protected by patents. Like Gibson’s P.A.F.—“Patent Applied For”—humbucking pickups. Or the Stratocaster’s “Original Countour Body”, beneath which the words “Pat. Pend.”, “Patent”, and eventually nothing at all have appeared over the years.
That’s the important thing to know about patents: they expire. After seventeen to twenty years—depending on when the patent was filed—the patent expires and the invention enters the public domain, available for anyone to use.
And by the heart of the Lawsuit Era, all those early patents were expiring. The coming battles would not be about how guitars worked—they would be about what they looked like.
This brings us neatly to our second and third protection pillars, which overlap quite a bit: trademarks and trade dress.
If patents are meant to protect inventions, trademarks and trade dress are meant to protect brands.
Trademarks have evolved over the years. Originally, they were largely limited to things like names, logos, and slogans that were indelibly linked to a particular product or company. Appearance wasn’t really part of the equation.
But over time, the idea that shapes—or even colors—could have that same connection to a brand took hold. These visual identifiers, which we now refer to as trade dress, can be protected just like more traditional trademarks. The shape of a Coca-Cola bottle and even the specific shade of red associated with the company’s branding are both protected examples.
To receive trademark protection, a company generally must show that a name, logo, slogan, or other identifier is distinctive and helps consumers identify the source of a product. Put another way, when consumers see it, they immediately know who made it.
Trade dress falls into that “other identifier” bucket. The difference is that instead of protecting a name or logo, it protects the visual appearance of a product when that appearance has become closely associated with a particular brand.
Importantly, trademarks and trade dress have no fixed expiration date as long as they remain in commercial use and are actively defended.
Copyright is a bit different from our other three protection pillars. Rather than protecting inventions or brands, it protects creative works such as books, paintings, photographs, and music.
Historically, copyright had little relevance to the guitar industry. Few people would argue that a Stratocaster was a book, a painting, or a song. But in recent years some courts have become more receptive to the idea that industrial designs can also be artistic works deserving of copyright protection.
Which is why, nearly fifty years after the Gibson-Ibanez lawsuit, Fender’s attorneys are once again arguing over who can legally build a Stratocaster-shaped guitar. Their recent victory in Germany came when the defendant failed to show up in court, so we still don’t know how that strategy will fare when someone decides to fight back.
So that’s our whirlwind tour of intellectual property. Now let’s talk about Japan. Because to understand the Lawsuit Era, you first have to understand what was happening there after World War II.
The war left much of the country’s industrial base devastated. Rebuilding it became a national priority. During the 1950s and 1960s Japanese manufacturers rapidly modernized, investing heavily in new machinery, manufacturing techniques, and export-oriented industries.
At first, many of the products flowing out of Japan were inexpensive consumer goods aimed at foreign markets. Cameras. Radios. Televisions. Tape recorders. In the United States, “Made in Japan” was often shorthand for “cheap.”
But there was a catch: Japanese manufacturers were getting better. Much better.
Companies that had begun by competing on price increasingly found themselves competing on quality. By the late 1960s and early 1970s Japanese firms were producing cameras, audio equipment, motorcycles, and automobiles that could stand alongside—and often surpass—their American and European competitors.
Now take everything I just said and replace “cameras” or “motorcycles” with “guitars“.
Early Japanese guitars were mostly inexpensive beginner instruments exported under dozens of different brand names. They were affordable, widely available, and often featured…interesting designs that would never be mistaken for a Fender, Gibson, or Rickenbacker.
Despite the bewildering array of brand names, much of the industry’s output came from a relatively small number of factories, including Fujigen, Matsuoka, Guyatone, Matsumoku, and Teisco.
And the more guitars these factories cranked out, the better they got. Meanwhile, back in the US, Fender had been sold to CBS in 1965 and Gibson to Norlin in 1969. And in both cases, the new owners were generally more focused on profitability than product. Quality began to suffer.
It should come as no surprise, then, that in the early 1970s the Japanese manufacturers began making very faithful reproductions of golden era Fenders and Gibsons for the notoriously picky Japanese domestic market.
And some of the copies were really quite good. In some cases, they were even better than the guitars coming out of the US factories. And even in the pre-internet age, word got around.
Since Ibanez found itself at the center of the lawsuit that gave the Lawsuit Era its name, let’s take look at how its product line evolved over this period.
By the late 1960s, Ibanez was already exporting inexpensive guitars to the United States. Like many Japanese instruments of the era, they were affordable, widely available, and often featured designs that would never be mistaken for American guitars.
That changed in 1970 when Ibanez moved production to Fujigen—one of Japan’s premier guitar factories. Almost overnight, the catalogs transformed.
No more crazy body shapes. No more weird pickups. Instead, the 1971 catalog is full of credible Les Paul, Stratocaster, SG, and Jazz Bass replicas.
They weren’t exact replicas…yet. The woods were a little cheaper, the necks on the Gibson-style guitars bolted on, and the electronics remained somewhat crude. But they looked the part, were well made, and sold for a fraction of the price of the American originals.
It took a few years for the large American companies to really notice. But once they did, they realized they were in trouble. Let’s return to our intellectual property pillars of protection. We’ve already established that the patents had all expired. But what about the trademarks? What about the protected trade dress?
Brand and model names had all been trademarked. But the idea that the shape of a guitar might itself be protectable intellectual property was still in its infancy.
If we go back to our Coca-Cola bottle, it had received one of the earliest “non-traditional” trademarks in US history in 1960, making it one of the first products whose shape alone enjoyed legal protection. Could the same concept apply to guitar shapes?
Over 1974 and 1975 both Gibson and Fender issued a blizzard of trademark applications in an attempt to protect their designs from these Japanese imitators. Who were getting better all the time, it must be noted.
And while we’ve singled out Ibanez since they would become Gibson’s first target, they were far from alone. Brands like Burny and Greco and Univox and many more were cranking out increasingly faithful copies of Gibsons and Fenders…and even Rickenbackers.
Over the course of 1974 and 1975 the trademark approvals started rolling in. They weren’t everything Gibson and Fender had hoped for.
Remember our rough test of “when consumers see it, they immediately know who made it”? The Patent and Trademark Office determined that, given the age of these designs and the fact that they had been copied since almost day one, that test simply wasn’t met when it came to things like the shape of a Les Paul or a Stratocaster body.
Headstocks, though, were a different story. Those passed the test. Those received trademarks.
And with that, we arrive at the lawsuit that would give the Lawsuit Era its name.
On June 9, 1977 Norlin Group—Gibson’s parent company—filed suit in Philadelphia against Elger Company, Ibanez’s American distributor, over Ibanez’s use of Gibson’s trademarked “open-book” headstock and several inlay designs that had also received trademark protection.
Notice what’s missing from that list: Les Paul bodies, SG bodies, and virtually every other aspect of the guitars themselves.
The case did not go to trial. Faced with Gibson’s trademark registrations and a legal landscape that appeared increasingly unfavorable, Elger and Ibanez settled out of court for an undisclosed amount, and agreed to stop using Gibson’s trademarked designs.
Ironically, Ibanez’s reputation for quality had grown so strong by this point they had already begun moving away from the copies and towards selling original designs before the lawsuit was even filed.
Honestly, the Lawsuit Era should more properly be called the “Cease and Desist Era.” Once Gibson had demonstrated a willingness to defend its trademarks, most manufacturers saw little reason to pick a fight they were unlikely to win. A sternly worded letter was all it took.
The copies didn’t disappear overnight, and they continued to be sold for years in regions beyond the reach of the American courts. But the US was where the volume was, and manufacturers understood that if they wanted access to that market, they had to play by its rules.
Which brings us, at long last, to how Rickenbacker fits into this story.
Rickenbacker did not follow Gibson and Fender’s lead and spend the mid-1970s filing trademark applications. John Hall himself admitted “my dad never filed a trademark in his life”. So from the perspective of the Japanese manufacturers, Rickenbacker still appeared to be fair game even after the Ibanez settlement.
But if you page through those early Ibanez catalogs—or the catalogs of any other Japanese brand—you won’t find any Rickenbacker models. Remember, in the early 1970s hardly anyone was buying Rickenbacker guitars, and the 4001 bass had not yet exploded in popularity. That would change in 1973.
But those would not be the first Japanese Rickenbacker copies. In the wake of Beatlemania a variety of Rickenbacker copies began appearing in the US and Europe during the mid-to-late 1960s. Many were made by Teisco and wore names like Coronet, Idol, and Fandel.
These weren’t what you’d call faithful reproductions. “Rickenbacker-inspired” is probably the kinder description.
Such guitars even got a whiff of respectability when, amid growing frustration with Rickenbacker’s delivery delays, UK distributor Rose-Morris comissioned a line of guitars from Teisco to be sold under the Shaftesbury brand (Shaftesbury Street being the location of their main showroom).
But these crude imitations aren’t the guitars we’re talking about when we discuss the lawsuit era. Which takes us back to 1973.
You have to hand it to Ibanez and Fujigen: they were watching the market closely. As soon as demand for the 4001 began to explode, they were right there.
And we’re bringing Fujigen into the discussion because, while Ibanez was the primary US brand, these guitars weren’t exclusive to Ibanez. Fujigen would happily sell them to anyone who wanted them as a private-label instrument.
Offered in both set-neck and neck-through versions, these first 4001 copies used a number of off-the-shelf components—most notably Gibson-style “mudbucker” pickups—that kept them from being exact replicas.
Other details, however, were remarkably faithful. The bridge and crushed pearl inlays were essentially copied outright. The bass bridges even develop tail-lift over time!
By 1975, the copies had gotten much closer, with Rickenbacker-style pickups and bridge pickup surrounds—probably sourced from Maxon. They had even changed the full-width crushed pearl triangle inlays to inset poured acrylic, just as Rickenbacker had.
To be fair, there were still differences beneath the surface that helped to keep prices down. The bodies were often multi-piece, multi-layer constructions—with clear poplar tops and backs. Other savings came from inexpensive Japanese tuners, lower value potentiometers, and generic hardware.
Nor was Fujigen alone. Matsumoku was producing similar copies for brands like Electra and Univox, while Tokai supplied Fernandes and others. But as far as I can tell, only Fujigen offered neck-through copies—all other producers stuck with bolt-on construction.
The one brand we haven’t discussed yet is perhaps the most highly-regarded of them all today: Greco.
By the early 1970s, Greco had largely retreated from export markets to focus on Japan’s domestic market. And if there is one thing we’ve established so far, it’s that Japanese buyers were demanding customers.
They got the best of the best.
Would it surprise you to learn that the first “reissue” Rickenbackers weren’t made by Rickenbacker? They were made by Fujigen for Greco.
In 1979—three years before the B-Series guitars—Greco introduced the JLG-85, modeled after John Lennon’s 325s, and the PMB-800 (bolt-on) and PMB-1000 (neck-through) basses, modeled after Paul McCartney’s Wings-era 4001S.
Fun fact: Greco model numbers tell you quite a lot about the product. JLG stands for John Lennon Guitar, and PMB stands for Paul McCartney Bass. The number indicates the original list price—two digits for guitars, three for basses. So the JLG-85 retailed for ¥85,000 and the PMB-1000 for ¥100,000 in 1979—not exactly budget territory.
And that’s really the point. By the end of the Lawsuit Era, the best Japanese manufacturers weren’t simply building cheap copies. They were building serious instruments in their own right.
We have focused on 4001 copies, but starting in 1977 Greco offered Rickenbacker guitar copies as well—320, 330, and 480 replicas.
One of the most impressive details on the Greco copies is the tailpiece—and it’s further evidence that they weren’t trying to pass these guitars off as genuine Rickenbackers. They copied the distinctive Rickenbacker harp shape almost exactly, but replaced the famous “R” with a Greco “G”.
By 1979 Ibanez and most other established brands had stopped selling “Lawsuit Era” guitars in the US, although some retailers were still buying grey market guitars from Fujigen and Matsumoku. For Gibson and Fender, the Lawsuit Era was largely over.
Rickenbacker, however, still hadn’t moved to protect its intellectual property. So its Lawsuit Era would last a little longer.
It may seem ironic today, given how vigorously Rickenbacker would defend its designs during the John Hall era, just how late to the trademark game Rickenbacker actually was. Even after Hall bought the company from his father in 1984, it would still be years before he began filing trademark applications. And in the meantime, Greco kept making guitars for the Japanese market.
By the early 1980s, the Japanese manufacturers had become impossible to ignore on the global stage—even if shipments to the US had largely dried up. Fender and Gibson eventually adopted a variation of the old maxim: if you can’t beat them, join them.
In 1982 Fender partnered with Fujigen to produce official Fender Japan instruments for the domestic Japanese market. Gibson followed in 1988 with the launch of the Fujigen-built “Orville by Gibson” brand for Japan. Rather than fighting the Japanese manufacturers, they had decided to work with them.
Despite not having the same legal protections as Gibson and Fender, Rickenbacker still benefited from the climate those companies created. Ibanez, for example, stopped selling copies of all American guitars in the US market—including Rickenbackers—and most of the other major Japanese brands soon followed suit.
But Matsumoku and Fujigen were still making them, and they were still finding their way into the United States—usually under private-label brand names sourced directly from the factories.
To be fair, John Hall had plenty of other things demanding his attention. After purchasing the company in 1984 he had immediately set about overhauling both the product line and the manufacturing process—just in time for a college-radio-fueled resurgence in demand to swamp the factory. The famous Rickenbacker backlog was back with a vengeance.
And realistically, the bootleg private-label guitars finding their way into the US were more of an irritation than a crisis. The bigger problem was the Grecos being sold openly in Japan. Dealing with those would be more complicated.
While the same basic principles around trademarks and trade dress hold true in Japanese law, the standards surrounding product shapes have been much more stringent. This is a gross oversimplification, but once a design has been copied by multiple manufacturers for an extended period, convincing a court that consumers uniquely associate that shape with a single company becomes much harder.
Which meant that by the time Fender and Gibson were securing trademark protection in the United States, seeking similar protection in Japan was already a much steeper climb.
Rickenbacker finally jumped aboard the trademark train in the early 1990s, starting with the easy stuff: their brand name and logo. Then came the headstock shapes. The truss rod cover. And finally, by the early 2010s, even the body shapes themselves—one of the hidden benefits of not being widely copied during the Lawsuit Era.
Being unfashionable at exactly the right moment turned out to be an advantage decades later.
That largely solved the new guitar gray-market issue. But even guitars that predated those trademarks weren’t necessarily safe. Hall became notorious for aggressively defending those trademarks, and over the years countless eBay listings for older Ibanez, Aria, Electra, and other Rickenbacker copies would find themselves on the receiving end of a takedown request—often initiated by Hall himself.
But the trademarks still didn’t solve the Greco problem, though, and that was even more vexing.
This wasn’t a matter of a few copies being sold halfway around the world. In the 1980s and early 1990s, Japan was flush with cash and had become one of the American guitar industry’s most important export markets.
Vintage ‘burst Les Pauls and pre-CBS Fenders were disappearing into massive Japanese collections. Japanese players embraced vintage-style American guitars, and demand for Rickenbackers was stronger there than almost anywhere outside the United States.
So having a high-quality, locally produced alternative available was a real problem. Especially when there was no viable legal strategy to fight them with.
Greco had expanded its line of Rickenbacker copies since Hall had taken over from his father—further proof that the demand was real.
Since there was no practical legal solution, Hall chose a commercial one: flood the zone.
A shortage of product had given Greco a reason to exist. Eliminating that shortage by flooding the market with authentic Rickenbackers would remove that reason, Hall must have calculated.
The effect is easy to see in the Rickenbacker register. In the mid-1980’s Japanese entries only account for 6-7% of annual registrations. By the mid 1990s, that figure climbs to over 20%.
For most of the John Hall era, the backlog was a very real thing. Demand simply exceeded the company’s ability to supply it. Every guitar sent to Japan came at the expense of another market. It appears that was a tradeoff Hall believed was worth making.
Rickenbacker pushed every guitar they could into Japan. And the strategy worked. By 1996 Greco had discontinued their Rickenbacker copies.
The irony is hard to miss. The company that spent years without trademark protection ultimately ended its Lawsuit Era without a lawsuit. It ended it by doing what had prompted the Lawsuit Era in the first place—making the guitars people really wanted available.
Rickenbacker’s Lawsuit Era had finally come to an end—twenty years late.