Joe Satriani may have a case against Coldplay

If Joe Satriani wants to ponder what might occupy his time in the next several years besides producing blazing guitar riffs and offering tips to young players, he could consider the case of Corey Glover.

Glover, the lead singer of the Grammy-winning rock band Living Colour, was asked in 1998 to write a couple of songs for the pop group TLC. The first one he wrote was rejected. But after he submitted the second, he didn’t hear a word.

In 1999, TLC released a song called “Unpretty,” which to Glover sounded eerily like the second song — “Make Up Your Mind” — that he and his writing partner wrote for the group.

“I was upset, of course,” Glover said when he first heard “Unpretty.”

“But at the time I also felt like it was a good song. In a way, I was almost flattered — until I heard nothing from them. It made me think basically, ‘Is this the way they’re going to treat me?’”

That was then. In August of this year, Glover and his writing partner, Michael Cirincione, finally got the go-ahead from an appeals court to proceed to trial with their case in a lawsuit that was first filed in 2002 against songwriters Dallas Austin and Tionne Watkins and the corporate entities behind TLC.

When asked why he hung in there so long, Glover replied: “This isn’t fair. This isn’t about trying to make a quick buck, obviously. This is our livelihood.”

Glover’s case isn’t typical, but then, it’s difficult to define what constitutes a typical case of music plagiarism. In short, sometimes it’s a matter of stealing. Sometimes, an artist or artists can unconsciously take a song from another source. And sometimes it’s pure coincidence, a matter of great minds thinking alike.

The music annals are rife with such cases. Some of the most notable: In 1971, George Harrison was sued because his 1970 hit, “My Sweet Lord” was said to be borrowed, albeit unintentionally, from the 1963 single, “He’s So Fine” (Harrison lost); an amateur songwriter named Ronald Selle sued the Bee Gees in the early 1980s because he claimed his song, “Let It End,” was used by the group to create “How Deep Is Your Love” (the Bee Gees ultimately prevailed); and in one of the more unusual cases, John Fogerty, formerly of Creedence Clearwater Revival, was sued by Fantasy Records for plagiarizing himself, that is, the plaintiffs asserted that his solo song, “The Old Man Down The Road,” was taken from the Creedence hit “Run Through The Jungle,” for which they owned the copyright (Fogerty won).

Satriani vs. Coldplay
Satriani claims in his suit that Coldplay’s “Viva La Vida” is a rip-off of the melody of his 2004 instrumental, “If I Could Fly.” Speaking with the Web site musicradar.com, Satriani said of the case: “Almost immediately, from the minute their song came out, my e-mail box was flooded with people going, ‘Have you heard this song by Coldplay? They ripped you off, man.’”

Coldplay issued a statement shortly after the lawsuit was filed that said in part: “If there are any similarities between our two pieces of music, they are entirely coincidental, and just as surprising to us as to him.”

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YouTube has a veritable cornucopia of comparisons of the two songs. Clearly, there are enough similarities to raise questions. But plagiarism? What are the criteria to prove Satriani’s assertions, or anyone’s for that matter?

“The important point is whether there was access,” said Oren J. Warshavsky, an attorney who handled the appeal for Glover and his writing partner case against TLC. “It’s very unlikely for a person to have the same inspiration as another person.”

The defendants in Glover’s case against TLC, represented by Orin Snyder — yes, that’s right, two attorneys with similar first names arguing a plagiarism case — assert that the defendants started work on their song weeks before Glover and Cirincione began work on their song, and that the plaintiffs have not established the essential element of their case: that the defendants had access to the original song.

These key points will be just as central in Satriani’s case against Coldplay.

“What the second author, Coldplay, has to show is that they had not heard the Joe Satriani song,” Warshavsky said. “An outrageous example would be to say that for the last five years you were living in the middle of the Pacific with no TV and no CDs. Unfortunately, living in modern society with the Internet it’s very difficult for a defendant, the second author, to say he or she had not seen a published work.”

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