Maybe you don't know anything about guitars. You might still recognize a Fender Stratocaster. It's an iconic design.

Iconic objects eventually stop feeling owned by their inventors. They enter the culture itself. Fender's Stratocaster and Telecaster crossed that line long ago. They became less like ordinary products than public language--modified, copied, repaired and re-interpreted by generations of musicians, tinkerers and garage obsessives.

Which helps explain why Fender's recent "cease and desist" crackdown against boutique guitar makers copying their designs has produced such a fierce backlash online.

For the past couple of weeks, guitar forums have sounded less like discussions of trademark law than arguments about cultural inheritance. Musicians who ordinarily agree on nothing have uniformly condemned Fender's heavy-handed "bullying."

But Fender may not be entirely wrong.

I own five Fender electric guitars, including a heavily played Fender Custom Shop Nocaster that may be the single most useful object I possess besides my laptop and coffee maker. Leo Fender belongs in the first rank of American industrial designers alongside Raymond Loewy and Steve Jobs.

The Telecaster remains one of the great design achievements of the 20th century. It is brutally simple, modular, repairable, almost anti-romantic. You can disassemble one with a screwdriver and a little nerve. It feels less handcrafted than engineered. Like a pickup designed by an industrial modernist.

Which is why Fender's recent efforts to aggressively defend the shapes of its........

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