The current rounds of litigation are not about patents - which relate to a new invention - but trademarks, which relate to the look and source of the goods.
The first trademark law (ever) was the US Lanham Act, which is celebrating it's 75th anniversary on Thursday. If you do the math you'll note that the parent company has been doing business since 1894, which pre-dates trademark law; these issues were previously covered under copyright. All jurisdictions have their own trademark laws that only relate to their nation-state jurisdictions so [technically] a US trademark only works in the US.
Trademark laws have been changing, with the biggest wave of changes coming on the tail of the global adoption of the internet, with companies often finding themselves caught in the cross-fire as what worked yesterday suddenly changes tomorrow. That said, Gibson has a ton of registered trademarks in the US and abroad and while they are often vilified for enforcing their IP rights, there is a bunch of litigation going on behind the scenes with people like Collings trying to get those registrations cancelled.
There's much more going on here than meets the eye.