I’ve recently been piano shopping. The premier brand with name recognition is Steinway. The major competition for a new Steinway is a used Steinway.
As pianos age, various components wear out, crack, break. There’s a huge industry of piano technicians who rebuild pianos, relying upon specialists for components such as soundboards. There are rebuilding companies which use the exact same wood in their soundboards as Steinway, and employ technicians who had worked at Steinway for 30 years shaping and installing these soundboards.
The resulting piano has a soundboard made from the same wood, aged in the same way, shaped the same way, installed by the same person, into an original Steinway case, refinished using the same finish, applied using the same technique, strung with the same strings, with new Steinway hammers, on an action refurbished with Steinway parts, connected to original Steinway keys, and yet, according to Steinway, it’s not a Steinway.<p>As of ~2018, Steinway no longer authorizes an official aftermarket label used by rebuilders for their soundboards, claiming that only a piano using genuine Steinway components in the sound generating portion of the piano - is a Steinway. The soundboard is included in the list of components, and Steinway won’t sell a genuine Steinway soundboard to piano rebuilders. They’re only available in the Steinway rebuilding shop, where you can imagine that rebuilding your old Steinway costs as much as a brand new Steinway.
So, all these rebuilt Steinways are using illegal trademarks according to Steinway.
The rebuilding community appears to generally ignore this trademark issue, and continues to apply the Steinway brand to these remanufactured pianos. Old Steinway are regularly sent down to Mexico for rebuilding, and return across the border with these fake trademarks. The pianos are advertised online, honestly, as a rebuilt 1926 Steinway Model B, rebuilt in 2021. Nobody is being fooled into thinking this piano from 1926 was put into storage and pulled out in 2022 looking brand new and sounding like a brand new piano. Yet Steinway threatens to sue.
These Shop Safe restrictions will give the Steinway lawyers even more tools to stop this knockoff trade impinging upon their copyright.<p>It’s as if a BMW dealer won’t sell BWM badges to a body shop because the drivers seat was replaced with a Ricardo seat. Or a better analogy is that the drivers seat, the pedal covers, the steering wheel, the shift knob, the transmission, the engine, the wheels and the tires are what makes a BMW, “the ultimate driving experience”, and if you change any of those components, you can no longer claim it’s a BMW, and if you do, you’re infringing upon the BMW trademark… while only selling new BWM tires through the BMW service department, that cost as much as a new BMW.