Joe Satriani may have a case against Coldplay

The key is access
Music plagiarism is a topic that intrigued Charles Cronin so much that he helped create a web site dedicated to it. Currently he is a visiting fellow at Yale Law School, but he oversees UCLA’s Music Copyright Infringement Project, which is a resource for law students and other interested observers. In the beginning, it included only published opinions, but has expanded to also include current cases. Although it may not contain every single case of music plagiarism recorded by man, it contains quite a few of the major ones.

Cronin concurred that the key element in any such case is access.

“Once you’ve gotten the court’s attention and the case moves forward,” he said, “you actually need to demonstrate infringement, you need to establish first of all that there was copying. That sounds obvious, but actually there’s a little more involved. Copying means the defendant actually took a materially significant portion of the complainant’s work that is original to him or her.

“In think in most cases it’s almost impossible to prove there is infringement. There would have to be direct evidence of, say, the defendant at the photocopying machine pushing a button.

“So you have to prove the defendant had reasonable access to the work, in this case Joe Satriani. His recordings are readily available. Whether Coldplay’s personnel is actually intimately familiar with his work is not the question. You can buy Satriani’s recordings in stores. Access shouldn’t be a problem at all. Once you establish access, you have to demonstrate that there are substantial musical similarities between the two works. That’s when it becomes almost impossible to prove.”

That last point is what kept Peter Case out of court.

‘All he had to do was change a few notes’
Case is a guitarist and singer-songwriter who fronted the Plimsouls in the 1980s and now tours as a solo artist. He’s also a musicologist and teaches songwriting at the famed McCabe’s Guitar Shop in Santa Monica, Ca. Many years ago, he believed a band that he would not name stole one of his songs, so he went to see his music publisher.

“I sat in on a meeting and the lawyer said, ‘Obviously, they took it on purpose, but they know how to do this,’” Case recalled. “They knew how to ‘flip’ it to make it different enough so that they’d win the suit.”

Case then remembered a comment he said John Lennon once made about Harrison’s “My Sweet Lord” lawsuit. “John said, ‘I don’t know how George got caught on ‘My Sweet Lord.’ All he had to do was change a few notes,’” Case said.

The process of songwriting, like any creative endeavor, is often mysterious and murky. What seems like a brilliant burst of musical inspiration can simply be the release of a deeply embedded memory.

“For people who are a lot less experienced, it’s easy,” Case said, “especially for a songwriter who is young working without any input from anyone.

“I had an experience when I was starting out. I was up at midnight, feverish inspiration. The next morning I realized I recomposed one of the Beatles’ songs.”

For some, plagiarism is just business
And as a teacher, he said, he occasionally notices the same phenomenon occurring with his students. “I had people bring in songs (to class) and played them and I said, ‘That’s really good. That’s ‘Breakdown’ by Tom Petty.”

But Case admitted that sometimes in the music world it’s more insidious than simply one artist unintentionally pilfering from another. “There are a lot of people in popular music who are not great songwriters. They have no ideas,” he said. “They’re just these businesses. I believe some of these groups say, ‘Hey man, we need another single. Let’s just take this.’ It’s that cold sometimes.”

Obviously, Satriani either believes that, or he believes that his song was stolen even though Coldplay might not have realized it, or else he would never have embarked on the often lengthy and serpentine legal path involved in a music plagiarism suit — the same path that Corey Glover has traveled, and of which he still hasn’t reached the end.

“It’s a lawyer’s trick to drown you in paperwork, or a lack of paperwork, and hope you’ll go away,” Glover said. “The people we’re suing have had deeper pockets and corporate partners to help them out.

“You can go through something like this forever. Unless you’re determined, you can be discouraged very easily.”

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