Ace Flibble
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Not surprising. In fact It's quite surprising Warmoth have been able to produce them for so long.
If it is a legal matter then I'm with Gibson here. The simple fact is that copyright and trademark laws necessitate the copy/trade owner aggressively pursues any person(s) or company which either impeaches, infringes, copies or otherwise tries to do something which may damage that rights claim. If they don't follow up on every single case then they lose their rights to the subject and then absolutely anybody can rip them off as much as they want.
Basically, trademark law is very, very all-or-nothing. You have to either take claims out against everybody and sue them all into the ground or you give up all rights to claim if you miss a single one. So obviously with a big company like Gibson or Fender, who have countless trademarks, that means they have to get pretty trigger-happy with the legal action. It's not a case of a company "whining". They don't have a choice. You protect your IP or you lose all rights to it, it's that simple.
If it's a case of Warmoth facing scaling manufacturing costs, be it wood supply, time, whatever, then that's a shame but equally unsurprising. Cost of manufacture, in all sectors, has tripled over the last five years and even though we're mostly out of recession it's still yet to settle back to anywhere near what it used to be. It costs more to put stuff out while customers demand lower and lower prices. American companies are especially screwed because, well, y'all are the ones that started it. That's what you get when the average citizen has credit debit equal to 138% of their annual income. We in the UK are a little less screwed, but UK luthiers and brands are still struggling. Meanwhile you've got countries like Poland where they don't live off credit anyway, so they've been able to go from strength to strength, creating further competition for US and UK companies.
If I was Warmoth and looking to cull something from the product line to speed up production and lower costs, the Gibson-style parts would be the first things to go.
If it is a legal matter then I'm with Gibson here. The simple fact is that copyright and trademark laws necessitate the copy/trade owner aggressively pursues any person(s) or company which either impeaches, infringes, copies or otherwise tries to do something which may damage that rights claim. If they don't follow up on every single case then they lose their rights to the subject and then absolutely anybody can rip them off as much as they want.
Basically, trademark law is very, very all-or-nothing. You have to either take claims out against everybody and sue them all into the ground or you give up all rights to claim if you miss a single one. So obviously with a big company like Gibson or Fender, who have countless trademarks, that means they have to get pretty trigger-happy with the legal action. It's not a case of a company "whining". They don't have a choice. You protect your IP or you lose all rights to it, it's that simple.
If it's a case of Warmoth facing scaling manufacturing costs, be it wood supply, time, whatever, then that's a shame but equally unsurprising. Cost of manufacture, in all sectors, has tripled over the last five years and even though we're mostly out of recession it's still yet to settle back to anywhere near what it used to be. It costs more to put stuff out while customers demand lower and lower prices. American companies are especially screwed because, well, y'all are the ones that started it. That's what you get when the average citizen has credit debit equal to 138% of their annual income. We in the UK are a little less screwed, but UK luthiers and brands are still struggling. Meanwhile you've got countries like Poland where they don't live off credit anyway, so they've been able to go from strength to strength, creating further competition for US and UK companies.
If I was Warmoth and looking to cull something from the product line to speed up production and lower costs, the Gibson-style parts would be the first things to go.
