
Fender declared war on guitar makers. Lululemon declared war on Costco. Ugg declared war on Quince. Welcome to the era of the dupe product wars.
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On the show today, we're gonna talk about guitars. But don't worry if guitars aren't your thing, cause we're also gonna talk about Lululemon 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. It 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 Froot Loops. Or maybe your parents didn't want their wasn't real Louis 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.
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The impact of this could be nuclear. It could be absolutely catastrophic for the guitar industry as a whole.
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And we're see how that's going for them on Today Explained from Vox. Support for this show today comes from Anthropic, the team behind Claude. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter with deep research. Claude's research capabilities go way deeper than basic web search, comprehensive research, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes for problems worth solving. You can get started with Claude at Claude AI todayexplained. That's Claude AI todayexplained Support for Today Explained comes from Fetch. Fetch is pet insurance, if you hadn't figured it out. Do you have a pet? According to a study from a pet insurance company from a few years ago, every six seconds a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill over $1,000 and it almost never comes at a convenient time. So check out Fetch. You get paid up to 90% of vet bills. You can use Fetch for any vet in the US and Canada. Every vet is in network. Go to fetchpet.comsave right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.comsave. Today Explained is here with friend of the show Charlie Harding, host of co host of the Switched On Pop podcast, which if you're not listening to why? Why Charlie, we're here to talk to you about guitars and it turns out you're surrounded by guitars. Is there a Fender Stratocaster back there?
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I feel like right over my head. Yes, I got a Fender Stratocaster, Fender Telecaster.
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You are clearly a guitar player.
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Yes.
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And there is a fight right now in Guitar World. Tell us about the fight.
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It's a guitar battle. So Fender, who are known for making the famed Stratocaster guitar, have recently been issuing cease and desist letters to other guitar builders telling them, you gotta stop producing guitars that look like our Stratocasters.
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Fender fired shots yesterday. Today they just launched a full scale invasion. I got a letter here, a copy of a cease and desist letter that a US boutique guitar builder received three days ago. Basically it says, dear sirs or madams, we're writing to you in the name and on behalf of Fender Musical Instruments Corporation. Our clients has claims against you to
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cease and desist from further marketing such guitars.
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Disclosure of information.
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They're asking guitar manufacturers to recall their models to destroy these instruments.
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Multiple boutique guitar builders here in the US receive virtually identical legal demands from Fender lawyers. Stop making guitars. Stop shipping guitars. Stop destroy all your guitars and send us a bunch of money.
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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 Stratocaster 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 Stratocaster shape that it, it almost stopped being a guitar design and became the
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default image of electric guitar itself.
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For people who don't know, I mean, the Stratocaster guitar shape, iconic, literally, the guitar emoji on your telephone is the Fender Stratocaster guitar.
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When you think electric guitar, you probably picture a Stratocaster. The Fender Stratocaster with its two bull horns and its shapely ergonomic body.
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The.
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That's what we think of when we think electric guitar. You probably first saw it in the hands of Buddy Holly, David Gilmore,
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Her
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Tom Morello, Mark Knopfler, the Edge, Steve Lacy, buddy Guy.
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Please, people.
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Jerry Garcias. I think really in many ways the Fender Stratocaster was made to be interpreted, if you will. Leo Fender, who developed the Stratocaster, was really inspired by Ford's manufacturing practices of modular easy to repair guitars. So rather than gluing on the neck, which he can't take off easily, he decided, why don't we bolt the neck on and basically the entire Fender Stratocaster is built to be modified. So when you picture Jimi Hendrix, he's playing an upside down Stratocaster. 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 Stratocaster style guitars. Because again, it is the guitar that people think of when they think the electric. And it's so modifiable.
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I went to Temu.com for the first time in 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.
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Yeah.
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And then I typed in guitar and guess what came up? A guitar that looks identical, Charlie. To a Fender straToCaster. And it's $53.49. Surely this is a thing that Fender is worried about, right? Because I'm guessing there is no Fender Stratocaster that costs $53.49.
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The Stratocaster was first developed in 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.
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Applicant has failed to establish that configurations
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involved in the applications before us have acquired distinctiveness. The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board of the United States Patent and Trademark Office ruled that the guitar shape had undergone genericization. Basically, it is now, you know, everybody's shape.
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This configuration is so common that it
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is depicted as a generic electric guitar in the dictionary.
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Huh. 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.
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So Fender recently had a court ruling in Dusseldorf, Germany. They saw that there was a Chinese company selling fake Stratocasters on AliExpress.
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If you don't know what AliExpress is, it's like this, like, you know, basically dirt cheap Chinese knockoffs of everything under the sun. So they had Stratocasters on there. They 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. Vendor won a lawsuit by default judgment. They brought a lawsuit against a Chinese AliExpress seller of 60 Euro strat copies. And the AliExpress seller didn't show up to court. And it was on copyright grounds where they really pitched the idea heavily that the fenderstraat is this artistic piece.
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This Dusseldorf court says that the Stratocaster design qualifies as a copyrighted work of applied art under German and European law.
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Wow.
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And using this ruling, Fender says, well, we own this iconic Stratocaster 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 cease and desist letters. They say, basically, you gotta destroy those guitars and stop selling them.
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Charlie, dare I ask, why is Fender pursuing this claim in Germany of all places?
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In any legal case, you're always looking for the court which is going to side with, you know, your 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.
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And is the argument they're making in this court in Dusseldorf essentially the argument that you said they started making in the early aughts, which is that this is our baby, this is our whole thing. This is our bread and butter. Back off the rest of the you guitar manufacturers.
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Yeah, I mean, it's a reasonable 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 that only Gibson can make the silhouette of that Les Paul. And so it's reasonable that Fender would say, well, what about our guitar shape? I mean, frankly, the electric guitar, it doesn't really matter what the shape of the body is. Unlike the acoustic guitar, where the body shape really matters, with the electric guitar, you can kind of make it look like anything. That's why you have these like crazy V shaped guitars or these wild, you know, 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.
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Okay, you're using words like reasonable, like fair, with regard to what Fender is pursuing in this court in Dusseldorf, regardless 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.
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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, this reads as.
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So you won a case in Dusseldorf.
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Cool.
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I'm glad you won. But to turn that into this letter that is draconian and unfair and turns you into this biggest bully in the world. Where did that lead to this.
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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's trying to take something away, not just from the big guys, but also the little ones.
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Was this inevitable for Fender? Was this something they had to do to protect their bottom line?
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I think it's, it's the predictable corporate act. That's what you're gonna 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 mess.
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We're going to talk about the rest of the dupes and if anything's original anymore, when Today Explained is back.
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Today. Explain is 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?
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I think we might be. We could 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.
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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?
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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. Guitars, right? Clothing. If you want to look expensive but not spend a lot of money, this is the video for you. Makeup. I'm doing a full phase of drugstore dupes that are just as good, if not better than their luxury counterpart food.
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You've heard of Doritos, Blunchley, and Oreos, but I bet you haven't heard of Ditos, brunchly or Boreos.
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In this video, recipes, I'm gonna show you guys how to make copycat Outback steakhouse spinach dip. There are dupes for Lululemon pants. I saved $423 by shopping the Amazon Lululemon dupe instead of going to Lululemon. So you know why we're here today. Lululemon has sued Costco for selling dupes. So we've gotta check them out.
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These ones are $30.
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Lululemon are literally a hundred and something.
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There are dupes for Birkin bags, which are incredibly expensive, incredibly hard to purchase. Designer handbags that go for tens of thousands of dollars. That there was like a $50 version for sale at Walmart. It was called the Workin.
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All right, My Wallman's working is here.
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This is not just a working bag.
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It is my twerking 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 in that you don't have to go to somewhere kind of seedy or weird or, you know, black markety 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.
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And how do you find your dupes? Do you just go to dupe.com?
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dupe.com is a thing. Dupe.com, basically, you can copy and paste a URL to any product, plug it 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 lookalikes. The thing is, a lot of contemporary modern online shopping actually has all the tools you need to find a dupe built into the features. So Amazon, for example, just introduced 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 products. So it's basically like a reverse image search. TikTok has a feature where if you pause a 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.
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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?
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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 down 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, they were to rip this off. Like, is there 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 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 Ugg boot went after a dupe.
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Oh, so Ugg has been trying to sue Quince for making cheaper dupes that
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look exactly like the silhouette that they claim to be theirs.
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And the court said to Ugg, I don't care how many you sold or how well you branded the silhouette, it's too general for you to claim it as yours.
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The jury found that the designs were similar, but they invalidated the design patent at Deckers. And what the jury found was, yes, the product, the dupe, looked substantially similar to the original Ugg boot, to the patent, the design patent that Ugg had, but that the Ugg patent in the first place maybe should not have been issued, that it wasn't unique enough. And so that all of these questions get really muddy. Right. Even if you have a design patent for a product, is it, like, viable
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and it can turn people against you? Right, Because I guess people feel like they can rip off Fender because Fender's the biggest fish. And people feel like they can rip off Uggs 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?
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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 gonna buy a dupe of a Birkin because I can't afford a $50,000 handbag. And if there's a cheaper alternative, well, I'm just gonna buy that because now, you know, poor people deserve nice things too, or 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 bit the bullet and I bought the tabby dupes off Amazon. 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. Buying dupes is bad karma. Time has come for us to all collectively stop buying into dupe culture. I saw a video today that a creator posted saying, run to Kmart and buy 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 Gen Z care about everything other than counterfeits. The dupe 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 $5 and will last a really long time and is ethically made and looks good. And I think often that is not the case and often that's what dupes are, right? They kind of give you the illusion of finding something nice or finding something beautiful or something that you feel, you know, you identify with. But when you strip away a lot of it, it's a lie. You kind of, you get what you pay for. And the cost of things has gone down so much, especially since like, you know, Temu and Shein, these ultra fast fashion brands, that I think consumers have kind of forgotten what is literally possible when it comes to like cheap and good products. I think cheap and good products do still exist, but not to the extent that we would like to believe.
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How did you think when you were writing your piece, Mia, about where the Internet has taken the idea of originality?
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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, with. Like, 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.
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Mia Sato writes for the Verge, accepts no substitutes. Peter Balin on Rosen produced the show today. Joey Myers and Amina Al Saadi edited. Patrick Boyd and David Tadashore mixed. Gabriel Donatov made sure nothing was fake. I'm Sean Ramis, firm It's Today Explained.
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This episode of Today, Explained (hosted by Sean Rameswaram) investigates the explosion of “dupe culture”—the normalization and proliferation of imitation products (“dupes”) across multiple industries, from guitars and fashion to food, vacations, and more. The show examines how attitudes towards fakes have shifted, the legal and ethical implications, and the ways technology and the internet have supercharged the duping of everything, everywhere.
Guest: Charlie Harding, Switched On Pop Podcast
Guest: Mia Sato, Senior Reporter, The Verge
“Everything is Dupes” captures the seismic cultural shift around imitation—how the shame of “fakes” has faded and dupe culture has become a mainstream, algorithm-driven way of life. The episode uses the iconic Fender Stratocaster lawsuit to ask if anything is original anymore, exposing how commerce, tech, and consumer psychology shape our ever-duplicating world.
If you’ve ever wondered why everything looks like everything else, or why your $30 pants feel familiar, this explainer is for you.