Everything is dupes

your thing because we're also going to talk about Lou Lemon and Lip Gloss and Uggs and

“Recipes and Doritos and Oreos and the island of Santorini.”

Do any of those speak to you? Have you figured out what the show's about yet? It's about dupes. You used to be kind of embarrassing to own a fake. Maybe you didn't want your friends to know that your parents bought you store-brand fruit

loops. Your parents didn't want their friends to know that that wasn't real Louie V. But not anymore, we don't even really use the word fake anymore. We use the word "dupe" and everyone's getting into the duplication game. And some brands like Fender are fighting back.

The impact of this could be nuclear. It could be absolutely catastrophic for the guitar industry as a whole. And we're going to see how that's going for them on today's explain from Vox. Support for Explained It to Me comes from Fetch Pett Insurance. Do you have a pet?

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Go to fetchPet.com/save right now for your free quote. That's fetchPet.com/save. To make explained is here, with the friend of the show Charlie Harding host of Cohost

“of the Switched-On-Pot Podcast, which if you're not listening to, why?”

Why? Charlie, we're here talking about guitars and it turns out you're surrounded by guitars. Is there a fender stradocaster back there? Right over my head. Yeah.

I got a fender stradocaster, fender telecaster. You are clearly a guitar player and there is a fight right now in guitar world. Tell us about the fight. It's a guitar battle. So fender, who are known for making the famed stradocaster guitar, have recently been issuing

season-to-sisletters to other guitar builders, telling them you got to stop producing guitars that look like our stradocasters. A fender-fire shot yesterday, today they just launched a full-scale invasion. I got a letter here, a copy of a season-to-sis letter that a US boutique guitar bill builder received three days ago.

Basically it says, "Dear Sirs or Madams, we're riding to you in the name and on behalf

of fender musical instruments corporation, our clients has claims against you to cease and to cease from further marketing such guitars, disclosure of information." They're asking guitar manufacturers to recall their models, to destroy these instruments. Multiple boutique guitar builders here in the US receive virtually identical legal demands from fender lawyers, stop making guitars, stop shipping guitars,

destroy all your guitars, and send us a bunch of money. And this has blown up back in fender's face as guitar YouTube, which basically controls all of guitar culture, has had a major backlash saying, "Fender, you have no right to claim this stradocaster guitar shape. This belongs to all of us."

This is a PR disaster that will hurt you and haunt you fender for years. There's so much musical DNA in that stradocaster shape that it almost stopped being a guitar design and became the default image of electric guitar itself. For people who don't know, I mean, the stradocaster guitar shape iconic. Literally the guitar emoji on your telephone is the fender stradocaster guitar.

When you think electric guitar, you probably picture a stradocaster. The fender stradocaster with its two bull horns and it's shapeally ergonomic body, that's what we think of when we think electric guitar.

You probably first saw it in hands of buddy Holly.

Tom Morello. Mark Knott-Flur. The edge. Steve Lazy. Buddy Guy.

Please, people. Jerry Garcia.

“I think really in many ways the fender stradocaster was made to be interpreted if you will.”

Leo Fender, who developed the stradocaster, was really inspired by Ford's manufacturing practices of modular, easy to repair guitars, so rather than gluing on the neck, which you can't take off easily, he decided why we bolt the neck on.

Basically the entire fender stradocaster is built to be modified.

When you picture Jimmy Hendrix, he's playing an upside-down stradocaster. When you picture Eddie Van Halen, he's ripped out the pickups, put his own pickups in, he has painted the body, made it his own. People are constantly trying to make this guitar their own sound, and so manufacturers whether boutique or other big guitar makers have also tried to make S style stradocaster

style guitars, because again, it is the guitar that people think of when they think the electric and it's so modifiable. I went to timo.com for the first time my life actually, and they had me put a bunch of like deer in the right direction as like a human verification thing, very cool website.

“And then I typed in guitar, and guess what came up?”

A guitar that looks identical, Charlie, to a fender stradocaster, and it's $53.49. That fender is worried about right, because I'm guessing there is no fender stradocaster that costs $53.49.

The stradocaster was first of all, the 1954 fender didn't start trying to claim its

trademark over the body shape until 2003. They were denied the right to the ownership of that body shape in 2009. The applicant has failed to establish that configurations involved in the applications before us have acquired destictiveness. The trademark trial and appeal board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled

that the guitar shape had undergone generalization. Basically, it is now, you know, everybody's shape. This configuration is so common that it is depicted as a generic electric guitar in the dictionary.

“But all the same fender recently said, you know what?”

We're going to give this another try. So tell us about this recent attempt by this iconic brand to protect its iconic guitar. So fender recently had a court ruling in Düsseldorf, Germany. They saw that there was a Chinese company selling fake stradocasters on AliExpress. If you don't know what AliExpress is, it's like this basically dirt cheap Chinese knockoffs

of everything under the sun. So the stradocaster on the other ordered one, it was shipped to Germany. So then they were like, okay, they shipped this guitar to Germany. We established that they do ship here. The fender worn a lawsuit by default judgment.

They brought a lawsuit against a Chinese AliExpress seller of 60 euro strapped copies. And the AliExpress seller didn't show the court. And it was on copyright grounds where they really pitched the idea heavily that the vendor strapped is this artistic piece. This Düsseldorf court says that the stradocaster designed qualifies as a copyrighted work

of applied art under German and European law. Wow. And using this ruling, fender says, well, we own this iconic stradocaster body design shape, which the US court had said, no, you don't. So fender turns around and says, great, we own this shape in Germany and the EU.

And so they turn around and start issuing these season to cisletters. They say basically, you got to destroy those guitars and stop selling it. Really dare I ask, why is fender pursuing this claim in Germany of all, please?

In any legal case, you're always looking for the court, which is going to side with, you

are claim and Germany and European intellectual property law are particularly favorable to product design intellectual property cases. The Europeans definitely do it differently. They make different kinds of decisions than US courts are going to. And is the argument they're making in this court, and Düsseldorf essentially the argument

This is our whole thing.

This is our bread and butter.

Back off the rest of you guitar manufacturers. Yeah, I mean, it's reasonable to claim to make their biggest competitor Gibson has a famous guitar called the Les Paul. And they were given a right to the silhouette of that body that says the only Gibson can make the silhouette of that Les Paul.

And so it's reasonable that fender would say, "Well, what about architecture?" I mean, frankly, the electric guitar doesn't really matter what the shape of the body is. Unlike the acoustic guitar where the body shape really matters, but the electric guitar you can kind of make it look like anything.

“That's why you have these crazy V-shaped guitars, or these wild metal guitars with sharp”

points all over the place.

So yeah, if Gibson can claim that they own a body shape and they were granted the right to it in 1993, then fender, I think, reasonably would pursue the same thing. Okay, you're using words like reasonable, like fair, with regard to what fender is pursuing in this court in Düsseldorf, regarding dupes from China. And yet the whole reason we're here is because by pursuing this case in Germany, fender

ruffles feathers, the world over. Tell us about how that happens. People are upset that fender has made this aggressive legal claim. Fucking bullshit corporate ass fucks. This is not the way to do it, fender.

To publicly go after small builders so that you can monopolize the Stratocaster, in my opinion,

that's what this read says.

So you want a case? Düsseldorf, cool, I'm glad you won. But to turn that into this letter that is draconian and unfair, and turned you into this

“biggest bully in the world, where did that lead to this?”

They went after a lot of different manufacturers, not just this one from China, you know, the guitar manufacturing industry, some of it are big players, other guitar manufacturers are small boutique companies run by just a couple of people. So I think a lot of guitar fans have felt that, you know, fender is trying to take something away, not just from the big guys, but also the little ones.

Was this inevitable for fender? Was this something they had to do to protect their bottom line? I think it's like, it's the predictable corporate act. That's what you're going to do. It's like, this is our intellectual property, don't take it.

Even though, you know, I think a lot of musicians would like to believe that, you know, music is meant to be free. It's meant for everybody. It's for sharing. It's for our deepest emotions, and when art and commerce intersect, things get messy.

We're going to talk about the rest of the doops, and if anything's original anymore, then today explained his back. Support for the show comes from talk, I agree. When your mental health is suffering, therapy can help, but sometimes it's not the whole answer.

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Today explain his back with Mia Sato who's a senior reporter at the verge and recently wrote

“about dupes Mia I wonder are we like at peak dupe right now I think we might be we can”

probably surmise that there will be even more dupes in the future but definitely I think there are more dupes than have ever existed in the history of mankind right now yeah exactly it could get worse depending on whether you think it's a bad thing to begin with but we can get into that let's talk about dupe culture I mean for all the people out there who just buy the name brand product every time do those people exist maybe what exactly is dupe culture what has it become dupe

culture is this idea that the limitlessness of the internet allows you to find a cheaper alternative a copy something that is a reasonable stand-in for the thing that you actually want and it has permeated every industry uh guitars right clothing if you want a look expensive but not spend a lot

“of money this is the video for you make up I'm doing a full phase of drugstore dupes that are just”

as good it's not better than their luxury counterparts food you've heard of Doritos lunchlean orios but I bet you haven't heard of Dito's lunchlea or Borios in this video recipe you're going to show you guys how to make copycat outback steak house finished it there are dupes for Lulemon pants I saved 423 dollars by shopping the Amazon Lulemon dupe instead of going to Lulemon so you know I were here today Lulemon has sued Costco for selling dupes so we've got to check them out these ones

are $30 and the ones from Lulemon are literally 100 and something there are dupes for broken bags which are incredibly expensive incredibly hard to purchase designer hand bags that go for tens of thousands of dollars that uh there was like a $50 version for sale at Walmart it was called the workin all right my wellness working is here this is not just the workin bag it is my token bag there are dupes for fancy pots and pans there are dupes for lip glosses and lip oils

and lip stains there are dupes for vacations someone was marketing a different island as a dupe of Santorini right so you can kind of apply this dupe framing to just about anything what's different now is that dupes are kind of just a way of life um in that you don't have to go to somewhere kind of cd or weird or you know black marketie to get a dupe anything you can think of dupe culture means that there's a dupe out there of it somewhere but it's walking a line

being very careful not to infringe on things like trademark or copyright and how do you find your

dupes do you just go to dupe.com dupe.com is a thing dupe.com basically you can copy and paste a URL

to any product well get into dupe.com and it will do a reverse image search of the web and find products that look similar some of them might be cheaper some of them might be expensive but the whole idea is you're looking for look alike the thing is a lot of contemporary modern online shopping

just introduce a new feature where you can write out a text version of what you're looking for I'm

“looking for a red crop top with ruffle sleeves and it will use AI to generate an image of what it”

thinks you're describing and then use that AI generated image to look for similar product so it's basically like a reverse image search. TikTok has a feature where if you pause the video it will highlight products in the video and you can click those products and find similar looking

dupes on TikTok shop so finding dupes has never it's never been easier because a lot of these features

are built into the platforms that we're using in the first place. When you talk about just typing in a URL or copying and pasting a URL more likely into dupe.com or all these reverse image searches where do we end up on the legality? I mean that's sort of the million billion dollar question which is like what is allowed? Obviously I'm not a lawyer but when IP attorneys describe this to me every like every question I would ask them they're kind of like it depends

when you get time to something like fashion one you know expert told me that like a lot of it is not protectable this shirt that I'm wearing right it's like a button down shirt with a lace pattern no one should be able to own that specific thing just because a fast fashion company if they were to rip this off like is there a legal grounds to sue them? Maybe not just because two products look the same doesn't necessarily mean that it's illegal. There was a recent case um that was kind of you

know quite influential because it was one of the first dupe cases to my understanding but the creator

of the aug boot went after a dupe. So aug has been trying to sue quince for making cheaper dupes that look exactly like the silhouette that they claim to be theirs and the course that to aug I don't care how many of you sold for how well you rented the silhouette this two general for you to claim it as yours. The jury found that the designs were similar but they invalidated the design at that time and what the jury found was yes the product the dupe looked substantially similar

to the original aug boot to the patent the design patent that aug had but that the aug patent in the first place maybe should not have been issued that it wasn't unique enough and so that's where

all of these questions get really muddy right even if you have a design patent for a product

isn't like viable and it can turn people against you right because I guess people feel like they can rip off fender because fenders the biggest fish and people feel like they can rip off bugs because for like a decade it was like the boots to have and it doesn't feel like they're struggling.

“Is that a part of this like broader dupe culture that may or may not be peaking right now?”

The public's engagement with dupe culture is endlessly fascinating to me because people have a lot of thoughts and often the thoughts are around of course I'm going to buy a dupe of a broken because I can't afford a $50,000 handbag and if there's a cheaper alternative while I'm just going to buy that because now you know poor people deserve nice things too where I shouldn't have to be mega wealthy to afford a bag that I like and that thinking often colors the dupe discourse.

Now that we can't afford anymore I think we're romanticizing the idea of dupes because like we wouldn't have money to buy the real thing anyway. I did the full egg and I thought these have the dupes and you know it gets messy and it gets really heated and emotional I think because we're talking about something that Americans love to do which is consume which is shop and people get really defensive and protective of what they are able to buy and sort of like

the morality of dupes. Bying dupes is bad karma. Time has come for us to all collectively stop buying into dupe culture. A saw a video today that a creator posted saying "Run to Kmart" and by this top it is a dupe for this with consideration top. With consideration if you don't know is a small Australian business. I want to know why Jen's a care about everything other

“than counterfeits. The dupe I sort of think is never enough. This is my hot take but I think when you”

have a dupe you still lust over the product it's duping and in that way it's actually making them even more aspirational. I think that modern online shopping has kind of lied to consumers and almost like rewired our brains to make us think that there is such a thing that costs five

that is not the case and often that's what dupes are. They kind of give you the illusion of finding

“something nice or finding something beautiful or something that you feel you identify with but”

when you strip away a lot of it it's a lie. You get what you pay for and the cost of things has gone

down so much especially since like you know Timo and she in these ultra fast fashion brands that I

think consumers have kind of forgotten what is literally possible when it comes to cheap and good

“products. I think cheap and good products do still exist but not to the extent that we would like to believe.”

How did you think when you're running your piece Mia about where the internet has taken the idea

of originality? Yeah, yeah I mean I think our current recommendation algorithm driven feeds really make it so that copying someone or recreating something is not just easier but it

“actually sometimes makes more sense like think about the way that trends circulate right the”

platforms encourage us to use the same sounds as other people do the same dances. Edit in the same way pick up on the same formats they want dupes of the content. What I was interested in when I was writing this piece was like I found that the textures of the internet, the endless copies and the sort of similar but different creators and the little niches were recreating themselves in our physical world like in the things that we surround ourselves with. I would

be surprised if you went home and looked around your house and you probably have a dupe of something. I have dupes of stuff in my house that I didn't even know were dupes so you know they're all over and sometimes you buy a dupe without even realizing it. Miyasato writes for the Verge, accepts no substitutes, Peter Ballen on Rosen produced the show today, Joey Myers and Aminal Sadi, Edited Patrick Boyd and David Tadashore mixed

Gabriel Dunetop made sure nothing was fake. I'm Sean Romis for him. It's today explained. you