Joe Satriani v. Christopher Martin et al. (Coldplay) is back in the news now that laywers for Coldplay and Capitol Records have filed their responses to Satriani’s copyright infringement claim, writes The Open End.
They list nine defenses, including the tack that Satriani’s song “lacks originality and is thus not protectable by copyright”. This was the argument of their previous post on the case, where they provided several songs, spanning decades, which share the same melodic structure as the tunes under litigation. Still there were those partisans who were unconvinced and claimed that if we would only transcribe the two melodies — the chorus of “If I Could Fly” and the opening verse of “Viva la Vida” — we’d see that they are note-for-note identical and that Coldplay’s collective goose is cooked.
Read the full article here. If Satriani’s case truly hangs on an initial three-note sequence – long, short, long; five, six, four, it will be difficult to argue that one of his predecessors is not more deserving of that copyright.
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