Copping My Style

Can you legally protect an artistic style? Not currently, but an Adobe-backed bill, a seeming reaction to AI, is pitching the idea. Personally, I see a bunch of blurred lines.Two companies that have enabled literal decades of creativity have both landed on the same question around the same time: Who owns a vibe?One makes $5,000 guitars. The other makes software that they’d charge $5,000 a year for if they could. And creatives, as ever, are caught in the middle.Is it a Strat? Is it a knock-off? We’ll never know. (DepositPhotos.com)First up, we have Fender, the originators of one of the most important guitar designs of the past century, the Stratocaster. It’s been around so long that it’s basically generic at this point, often the starting point of many a luthier. But Fender disagrees on this point, with a single default judgment in a German court giving them just enough cover to call out their competitors, many of whom have been making Strat-like guitars for decades.Surprisingly close…