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Reuters reports that legendary rock guitarist Joe Satriani has sued COLDPLAY, accusing the Grammy-nominated stars of plagiarizing one of his songs.

Satriani's copyright infringement suit, filed on Thursday in Los Angeles federal court, claims the COLDPLAY song "Viva La Vida" incorporates "substantial original portions" of his 2004 instrumental "If I Could Fly".

The 52-year-old guitar virtuoso is seeking a jury trial, damages and "any and all profits" attributable to the alleged copyright infringement.

Read the entire report from Reuters.
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Sanjuro37

Satch? Really? You'd think Thom Yorke or Bono would have gone after them, but Satch?

leepyswetr

That song is also very similar to Annie Lennox's "Walking on Broken Glass."

PopcornTreeCt

If Tarantino can rip off everyone so can Coldplay!!

dvduser6

Very suprising...but I admit I could probably only recognize 2 or 3 Coldplay tunes. I wonder how this will play out.

NoirFan

There is only one Satch.




And I'm not too sure Joe Satriani falls under the category of "legendary".

story

I'm not a copyright lawyer, and those do sound pretty similar.

And yet...

Subjectively, Coldplay is pretty talented. I'm not sure they had any intentions of doing this.

Sanjuro37

Yep, and one Satchmo. So there's no conflict.

Boba Fett

Ditto. Even Mick Jagger accidentally ripped off k.d. Lang on Bridges to Babylon.

slop101

They had to speed up the Coldplay song quite a bit to fit with Satch - but yeah they're pretty close, though I doubt it's intentional.

NoirFan

The Cow

Armstrong was known as "Satchmo" (Satchel Mouth).

That album title is just playing a short to sound a little catchy.

Kal-El

Wow, that's pretty obvious.

B5Erik

They're toast.

I've heard songs that were successfully sued over that didn't sound nearly that close.

Decker

Yeah, I think those two are a lot more alike than "My Sweet Lord" and "He's So Fine".

I wonder why no one noticed this before now. It seems like one of those situations like the Rolling Stones and k.d. lang or Rod Stewart and Bob Dylan where the inadvertant infringement leads to a songwriting credit after-the-fact. Getting sued while running a Grammy campaign is probably the worst news they could have gotten.


Remember how Pearl Jam's "Given To Fly" totally ripped off Led Zep's "Going To California"? There was a reason given as to why Page & Co didn't sue, but I can't remember what it was. Does anyone else?

Giantrobo

You had me at "Coldplay sued".

DonnachaOne

About eight people listen to Joe Satriani, and those eight people sure as hell don't pay attention to Coldplay.

Michael Corvin

As I pointed out in the Grammy thread yesterday, the Coldplay song in question is nominated for Song & Record of the year. I doubt this case will be solved before the Grammy's but it will be interesting to see if it taints it in any way.

Jason

The Coldplay song is do derivative that it's no surprise someone is suing over it. I first heard it in an iPod commercial and thought "wow, the new U2 song is pretty cool".

SFranke

Maybe Kraftwerk can join Satriani and together they can get a class action going.

Rocketdog2000

You may have missed it, but we did a whole thread on this way back when the Coldplay album first came out, and some other dude was saying they ripped off his song. I'm too lazy to search for the thread, myself, but it's here somewhere.

I'm more surprised it took Satriani this long to bring about legal action, figuring if he hadn't right after the song first became popular, he wouldn't bother.

Rocketdog2000

And there you would be wrong on both counts, sir.

I listen to both, but I'll admit I didn't notice it right away. Also, Satriani has been releasing successful (and Grammy winning, I may add) albums since the mid 80's, and continues to do so to this day. You don't get to keep doing that if only eight people are listening to you. I'll give you he's not for everybody, but don't discount or underestimate his fan base just because you personally don't seem to like him.

atlantamoi

As I mentioned in that other thread, does anyone really believe any of the Coldplay members would have listened to Satriani? The songs sound amazingly alike, but I still can't envision them listening to that boring wankery.

PopcornTreeCt

How come Tom Petty never sued Red Hot Chili Peppers over Dani California?

Michael Corvin

Funny. I was thinking the same thing. I couldn't imagine Satch sitting around listening to that drivel to discover they ripped him off.