Back on topic, I think your point about musicians (and esp. songwriters) recognizing similarities more often than a typical audience is very important when it comes to deciding these cases.

Since the value of a song like Coldplay’s is directly correlated to the impression it makes on an audience, should the reasonable person/audience impression test be given more weight that the “expert analysis.”

I mean, an expert could go on all day about how similar to compositions are but if the general audience can’t hear it until it is pointed out to them in excruciating detail then isn’t that rather indicitave that they’re not all that similar after all?

As for My Sweet Lord, that case had to be a slam dunk because He’s So Fine is a song that EVERYBODY had heard – a giant hit – and it’s the same song pretty much all the way through, so that’s kind of one extreme.

The Coldplay case is more of a gray area I suppose, but the rights to their songs are so incredibly valuable that they have no choice to fight it or they’d open themselves up to a cottage industry of claims. I can see a lawyer on TV doing the ad: has YOUR song been ripped off by Coldplay? Maybe it has! Go check all your old tapes very carefully and give us a call at 1-800-INFRINGE – we’ll get you the compensation you deserve!

Nothing to write home about, I guess!

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In a recent Pitchfork review of Juliana’s latest, the writer declared The Blake Babies not to be as important as The Pixies or Mission of Burma, so I’d assumed that was the last word on the subject.

That song’s a good example of a song I wrote that I worried for a long time was probably unintentionally ripped off from somewhere. That’s the danger of trying to write catchy pop songs. How many melodies can you sing over a I-IV progression?

One that I noticed wasn’t mentioned – but does come under the umbrella of ‘unintentional infringement’ – was the fact that a little New York band, “The Creaky Boards” also used a similar melody in their song, ‘The Songs I Didn’t Write’.

If a virtually unknown band has discovered the same tune, as well as a ‘guitar legend’ and the Biggest Band in the World, how does it not represent the fact (to Satriani and others) that it could actually be pure coincidence?

If three artists – who are not linked in any known way – have come up with a similar sound, I think it’s going to be hard to pin an infringement stamp on Coldplay’s front.

But then, of course, all of [i]that[/i] comes down to this obviously flawed ‘audience test’ system, the arguments put forth by each legal entity, and the ‘similarity’ etc. – and all that, again, is still reliant on whether or not the case even goes to trial.

I agree with sstendhal, I really don’t want a settlement to take place out of court.

For starters, I believe Coldplay are in the clear – coupled with the above argument, Chris Martin wrote a letter to German band, “Kraftwerk”, asking for permission to use a riff from their song, ‘Computer Love’ in their own, ‘Talk’; I don’t see why he wouldn’t pay a well known guitarist the same courtesy…

Same goes with their recent use of ‘Life Through the Veins’ by Jon Hopkins on their latest release, “Viva La Vida or Death And All His Friends” – personally, I had never even heard of him before Coldplay used his music, so I don’t see him as this well known performer; but I do think that Joe Satriani is the bigger artist.

Chris Martin and the rest of the band have too much integrity to ‘steal’ from other musicians. They have never hidden the fact that they believe it is important to ‘prove themselves’ worthy of their job, that they are always trying to better themselves, to create something new and fantastic, and original. Copying/stealing, whatever, from someone else would be terribly contradicting, and extremely uncharacteristic of them.

And secondly, going to trial will hopefully shed some new light on the problem of music plagiarism, and set a new precedent for future copyright infringement cases.

Before becoming the Idolawyer, I was a professional musician and songwriter. I’ve had the experience many times of sitting down and writing a song or part of a song to my great excitement to later discover that it’s actually some ELO song I loved in 6th grade or something. I promise you, every professional songwriter lives in terror of having something slip by everyone and make it to a record – such as George Harrison’s My Sweet Lord.

As an aside on My Sweet Lord (held to have infringed the Chiffons “He’s So Fine”), that’s an obvious one to me for substantial similarity, but when I play it for my entertainment law students I get a lot of puzzled looks. Non-musicians are thrown by the wildly different arrangements and often have trouble focusing on the protectable elements of the melody and harmony.

I hope Coldplay gets the musical expert testimony on this matter or this will be a pretty harsh precendent.

Look what you can do with a blues progression:

Nevertheless, Coldplay could bring in an expert and show that the notes that Coldplay allegedly copied are common elements. For example, in Griffin v. J Records, the plaintiff claimed a seven-note sequence from her song was appropriated for the song “Dance With My Father” by Richard Marx and Luther Vandross. The defendant was granted summary judgement because the plaintiff did not present evidence to rebut the expert witness who demonstrated that the seven-note cascading and descending sequence is also ripped off from Beethoven, Bach, The Beatles, and The Left Banke, among others. Therefore it is what is known in copyright lexicon as “scenes a faire” – an element that is common to the genre and therefore not subject to protection, such as the twelve-bar-blues mentioned above.

In the discussion of this matter I’ve noted many people saying that the two songs also sound like something else. That could actually provide a compelling defense.