Joe Satriani has accused the band Coldplay of copying his song in a pending lawsuit filed last year.  Satriani says that Coldplay’s song “Viva La Vida” borrows substantially from his song “If I Could Fly.”  “Viva La Vida” won a Grammy for Song of the Year for 2008. Satriani’s song, released in 2004 was intended as a love letter to his wife and reportedly took him ten years to write.

Satriani is a Grammy nominated guitarist that has released a dozen solo albums selling in excess of ten million copies.  Dubbed “Satch” by his fans, he has played with several rock legends including Mick Jagger, Sammy Hagar and Alice Cooper.  Just in case you have been living under a rock, Coldplay is a British alternative rock band that has produced four major label albums and won seven Grammy awards.  They have sold in excess of 50 million records.  They have eschewed endorsement and licensing deals (with the exception of an iTunes commercial) and to their credit, Coldplay claims they give 10% of their profits to charity. 

Satriani says it was his fans that brought the songs’ similarities to his attention.  After Coldplay’s latest record was released, Satriani’s inbox was flooded with emails telling him he was being “ripped off”.  He said: “The second I heard, I knew…I felt like a dagger went through my heart.”  And Satriani is not the only one who feels cheated.  Cat Stevens claims that Coldplay infringed his song “Foreigner Suite”.  And it doesn’t stop there.  Creaky Boards, an indie rock band from New York, claim “Viva La Vida” is a ripoff of their song, “The Songs I Didn’t Write”.  Cat Stevens says he will wait and see how Satriani’s lawsuit plays out before taking any action.  Creaky Boards seem to have relished the publicity their band is getting.  After all, being compared to Coldplay can’t be such a bad thing for a relatively unknown band from Brooklyn. More...

After the news broke on January 12 that the Supreme Court had asked the Solicitor General for its views as to the CNN v. Cablevision case, which is now under review for certiorari,  I overheard two attorneys saying that the case could have a lot to say about the application of copyright law to user-generated content (“UGC”). That struck me as wrong, until I started thinking about it and realized that I had really never bothered to define that term very precisely. Roger Faxon, CEO of EMI Music Publishing, has been quoted as saying that UGC is “taking copyrighted content, whether that is a song or a recording, and the user is, without authorization, turning it into another product.”   That is precisely what’s going on in the Cablevision case: users are turning a time-bound television broadcast into a view-on-demand product.  Does the lack of “authorship” by the user change anything? Should it? 

If somebody uploading a copy of a sound recording onto YouTube gives rise to UGC, why not somebody telling Cablevision to record a movie for them on a digital video recorder (DVR)? Copyright consequences aside, does it matter that the YouTube content is visible to the world and the Cablevision DVR content is accessible only by a single subscriber? What follows is an attempt to think about these fundamental UGC questions without translating them into the language of copyright.  To paraphrase Benjamin Kaplan in his 1967 book, An Unhurried View of Copyright,  “I shall take you on a stroll over some of the [UGC] terrain and examine various knolls and gullies in a rather desultory, even naïve way; finally we shall climb to the top of a hill and see whether anything can be usefully said about the whole landscape.” More...