Lawsuit moves on.

[skydog52]

I saw this today. Old subject was archived.

https://www.nashvillepost.com/business/legal/dispute-between-Gibbons-and-competitor-moving-forward/article_1f9ae247-a660-5c82-bed1-2e3e2ee52f9a.html

[Gitfiddler]

I wonder why Heritage and G i b s o n don't move their long standing trademark infringement issues to binding arbitration and bring the legal pissing contest to an end.

Once that is done then maybe they could cease paying lawyers and focus their resources on making great guitars.

[MartyGrass]

It's hard for me to imagine that Heritage is creating significant harm to Gibbons.  Maybe so.  I'm glad the case remains in Michigan.

Gibbons is not the same company that it was in 1984.  Heritage isn't either.  These are two very large corporations/investor groups.

[DetroitBlues]

Sounds like a matter of who has the deeper pockets… I suspect Bandlabs might have enough to fight this unlike the other companies that were forced to pay license fees for G-Style Designs to stay in business.

[rockabilly69]

3 hours ago, Gitfiddler said:

I wonder why Heritage and G i b s o n don't move their long standing trademark infringement issues to binding arbitration and bring the legal pissing contest to an end.

Once that is done then maybe they could cease paying lawyers and focus their resources on making great guitars.

this!!!

[High Flying Bird]

10 hours ago, MartyGrass said:

Gibbons is not the same company that it was in 1984.  Heritage isn't either.  These are two very large corporations/investor groups.

That's right.  The reason Marv could build the Firebirds was because he designed it.  I know Heritage isn't building them any longer but there may be other considerations we don't know about for other models.   

[TalismanRich]

I'm still wondering what "new guitars" Heritage has launched.    Since I got my first Heritage in 2003,  they really haven't made anything different,  just various enhancements on the basic models. 

[MartyGrass]

2 hours ago, High Flying Bird said:

That's right.  The reason Marv could build the Firebirds was because he designed it.  I know Heritage isn't building them any longer but there may be other considerations we don't know about for other models.   

There may be an ethical argument there about the Firebird, but Aaron Cowles told me that much of the design was by committee, headed up by McCarty.  Aaron had to keep reconfiguring the instrument and the Flying V.  There was a channel where the pickups could go, not discreet routing.  He was told to slide a pickup in a direction.  They'd play it for a while.  They then would give it back to him and have him reposition the pickup.  The point is that there wasn't a single person who designed the guitar.  That was true with the Les Paul, the SG, and the semi-hollows.  Look at the odd pickup position of the ES-175.  That was by trial and error with approval by a small committee based on tone.

Marv may have come up with the Firebird body, which is brilliant.

Gibbons's argument on any innovation is that these guys worked for Gibbons and were paid, so the ideas belong to Gibbons.  Ren Wall has stories of missed patents based on that principle, which held in court.

If I had to bet, the Gibbons executives extant in the early days of Heritage were more protective of the Gibbons money makers.  They did quarrel about the Les Paul, which was a big ticket item for Gibbons.  Heritage didn't make a SG, which I'll bet would have been a fight.  The Heritage archtops had different dimensions than the Gibbonss.  Firebirds were not big sellers and maybe went under the radar when Marv made some or maybe they didn't care because Heritages were not close to the same price point.  Who knows?

The McCarty era was among the finest.  The executives were generally players and the company was service oriented.  It's not the cold, faceless corporation of today.  Take a look at some correspondence between Gibbons and the father of my family doctor while growing up, Doug Haddock, Jr.  This is not an isolated example.  https://reverb.com/news/gallery-1950s-letters-with-Gibbons-concerning-one-doctors-electric-guitar-purchase

Something happened around the time of the move to Nashville.  That event was very disruptive to many families and likely the unspoken core values of Gibbons.  It had become a commodity, an investment strategy, as opposed to a symbol of noble Americana.  I don't think it landed in Tennessee intact.

  

[yoslate]

10 hours ago, MartyGrass said:

 I don't think it landed in Tennessee intact.

  

Given the more broad context of your response Marty, this statement, I think, really hits the nail on the head.  A conversation regarding what "it" is and what "intact" might imply would be an interesting one, over a good single-malt.

[bolero]

Might be a good time to buy a custom core guitar. What if the big baboon wins in court?

[rockabilly69]

On 6/14/2021 at 4:32 AM, High Flying Bird said:

That's right.  The reason Marv could build the Firebirds was because he designed it.  I know Heritage isn't building them any longer but there may be other considerations we don't know about for other models.   

Marv didn't design the Firebird, Ray Dietrich the car designer did. Or do you mean he had input/changes into the design to make it workable?

[High Flying Bird]

5 hours ago, rockabilly69 said:

Marv didn't design the Firebird, Ray Dietrich the car designer did. Or do you mean he had input/changes into the design to make it workable?

I understood him to say he was the designer but he may have said he was a part of the team. 

[bolero]

It is interesting that the firebird is the only neck-thru gtr that came out of that collaboration with the automotive designer ( V, firebird, explorer, moderne (?) )

Speculating here, but I have my doubts that Dietrich would have presented much beyond the body shapes. He was an automotive designer who did concept work: ie sketches. Which may not have included actual construction details. Every other guitar was built the same as the other G solid bodies: body with neck glued on. Why was the firebird built the way it was?

I bet Marv knows

[Spectrum13]

4 hours ago, bolero said:

It is interesting that the firebird is the only neck-thru gtr that came out of that collaboration with the automotive designer ( V, firebird, explorer, moderne (?) )

Speculating here, but I have my doubts that Dietrich would have presented much beyond the body shapes. He was an automotive designer who did concept work: ie sketches. Which may not have included actual construction details. Every other guitar was built the same as the other G solid bodies: body with neck glued on. Why was the firebird built the way it was?

I bet Marv knows

IMO I believe the engineers at 225 Parsons Street turned a design/idea/marketing decision into a prototype into a model.  They did more than tooling. Did Les Paul design a solid body mahogany body with a single cutaway and carved maple top?  

[deytookerjaabs]

Yeah, the story of the big G you're all eluding to is not an isolated thing, it's the story of the country, changing values and a generation itself. 

[bolero]

17 hours ago, Spectrum13 said:

IMO I believe the engineers at 225 Parsons Street turned a design/idea/marketing decision into a prototype into a model.  They did more than tooling. Did Les Paul design a solid body mahogany body with a single cutaway and carved maple top?  

Curiously enough, Les' "log" prototype he built out of a railroad tie, had wings similar to the firebird.

Whoops I was wrong about the timeline above. The V, explorer, moderne didn't involve Dietrich. The firebird was much later (1963) & did. For some reason I thought the firebird was earlier.

Apparently Seth Lover sketched the V shape?

Anyway this is veering off topic. Please move on with the lawsuit!