Joe couldn't win but the case was settled out of court.

Good enough for you, Barrister?

If he couldn't win, there probably wouldn't have been a settlement (assuming there was one).

WTF are you even arguing here? IIRC, I was just pointing out your 'slam dunks' weren't slam dunks in actual civil litigation, and here you're triumphally announcing how a potential compromise outside a court of law proves . . . what?

What I said early on in this thread holds true: It's very difficult to prove copyright infringement in a court of law but it's likely that a settlement would be made and Satriani would receive a portion of their royalties.

The reason the courts were avoided is because it would have been costly for all parties involved and most likely, the only result would have been an outpouring of money into the court system.

With a settlement, it's a win for Satriani and it's not a public loss for Coldplay.

Neither would have been likely if this had actually gone to court.

I didn't lose anything. I just told you how I would vote based on the evidence that mcan presented.

"Coldplay is the absolutely shittiest ****ing band I've heard in my entire ****ing life. They are a mediocre imitation of Travis, who themselves were a mediocre imitation of Radiohead."

Chuck Klosterman.

I HATE COLEPAY

A settlement was always by far and away the most likely result.

You still didn't analyze the law worth shit.

Satriani carried the burden of proof and has far fewer resources at his disposal than Coldplay. Had your analysis of the law been correct (i.e. only direct proof can support a verdict), this would've never settled. A motion for judgment on the pleadings would've disposed of it immediately after the discovery period passed and Coldplay would have walked.

A settlement by Coldplay lends even more creedence to Satriani's position. Coldplay knew there was enough evidence to take it to a jury (i.e. indirect evidence and inference), so they settled.

You're doing a very good job of assigning inaccurate conclusions to relatively benign facts throughout this thread.

Wait a second. You just contradicted yourself.

Why would it be in Coldplay's favor to settle, even though Joe Satriani (according to you) doesn't have a enough money to fight in court?

Huh?

And furthermore, if there was enough evidence, as you state, to prove Satriani's claim, why would Joe even bother settling?

You really did just answer your own question.

A) I never said he didn't have enough money for a fight of any sort. I said only that Coldplay has far more resources. That means more experts, more eyes, more times to simply write motions requiring responses and delays. Satriani wouldn't be able to be nearly as aggressive nor would he likely be able to produce the # of paid experts. That doesn't mean he can't fight it, it simply means he couldn't do it as well.

B) Joe settled because he recognizes A. I never said he had enough evidence to win, I simply said he had enough to submit it to a jury, otherwise Coldplay wouldn't have offered to settle post-discovery. At that point, he doesn't know if the jury will accept his argument or not, but he knows that Coldplay has a hell of a lot more money to make their case with than he does. If he didn't have a strong enough evidentiary foundation to put a spook into Coldplay, they'd lean heavily on the realities of A and tell him to piss up a rope. He has that foundation, so Coldplay offered to settle. He recognizes A and the uncertainty of any jury verdict, so he accepted.

A settlement whereby money is given to a Plaintiff with far fewer resources than the defendant is virtually always a concession by the defendant that there's a damn good chance that they lose this one. This is simply a reality of civil jurisprudence.

That's rep.

Funny, we just studied this in my Entertainment Law course at my law school. The general consensus was that ColdPlay likely would have lost. The standard for the jury is whether the songs sound substantially similar to an ordinary listener.

If George Harrison lost in court b/c "My Sweet Lord" was too close to "He's so Fine" by the Chiffons, I think you've gotta say Satriani had a good case here.

Read this thread alone and you'll get a hell of a lot better breakdown of it than that. It's significantly more complicated than the songs sounding substantially similar. Further, I can't for the life of me figure out how an "ordinary listener" standard would be applicable here. "Ordinary person" standards generally only apply in cases of alleged unintentional malfeasance.

It's a matter of the jury believing that the songs are so similar sounding that Coldplay must have lifted it from Satriani. It's not an 'ordinary person' standard - each juror substitutes their own respective judgment. This case requires a finding of intentional wrongdoing, so the judgments/actions of an ordinary person here are immaterial.

I'm...uh...unimpressed by your entertainment law class.

Case Law in regards to copyright infringement has come a long, long way since the late 60's and early 70's. With all of the music that's been recorded over the past 40 years worldwide, it's extremely difficult to prove infringement.

There's only 12 notes and millions of songs since then.

Copyright violation doesn't have to be intentional wrongdoing. It can be subconscious. Look up Bright Tunes v. Harrisongs.

I wasn't trying to be comprehensive, just trying to make a quick point.

I don't think my class is a problem. I have a very experienced professor at a top 25 law school.

Edit - From that case:
"What happened? I conclude that the composer,12 in
seeking musical materials to clothe his thoughts, was
working with various possibilities. As he tried this
possibility and that, there came to the surface of his
mind a particular combination that pleased him as
being one he felt would be appealing to a prospective
listener; in other words, that this combination of
sounds would work. Why? Because his subconscious
knew it already had worked in a song his conscious
mind did not remember. Having arrived at this
pleasing combination of sounds, the recording was
made, the lead sheet prepared for copyright and the
song became an enormous success. Did Harrison
deliberately use the music of He’s So Fine? I do not
believe he did so deliberately. Nevertheless, it is clear
that My Sweet Lord is the very same song as He’s So
Fine with different words,13 and Harrison had access
to He’s So Fine. This is, under the law, infringement
of copyright, and is no less so even though
subconsciously accomplished."

In this case, I think there's far more involved, especially given Coldplay's stature as a "Megaband". If they had lost in court (which I still say was less than a 10% chance), they go down in the court of public opinion as copycats. It definitely would hurt their standing.

By settling, they avoid any embarrassing blurbs or an extremely embarrassing outcome. With a settlement, it just goes away...

Seriously, have you seen anything on 'net or the news other than the link I provided?

"Substantial similarity exists when the relevant aspects of the accused work are so similar to the relevant aspects of the copyrighted work that an ordinary, reasonable person would conclude that the defendant took material of substance and value from the copyrighted work and unlawfully appropriated it."

http://www.scottandscottllp.com/main...y.aspx?id=1632

Like I said, ordinary person...

The burden of proof is so high now that you virtually have to prove that the infringer actually heard the song that they infringed upon.

As I said earlier, this isn't 1970.

I know you have to prove they heard it. Access has always been an element AFAIK. I read somewhere that Satriani could prove access. Maybe I misremembered?

You missed the most important part:

The plaintiffs alleged they submitted their song for recording by Vassar and that Vassar rejected the song. Plaintiffs later recorded, copyrighted, and released the song on their own. Vassar also later recorded a song that plaintiffs alleged infringed on their copyright in the song they recorded.

So in this case, there is definite proof that Vassar heard the song, firsthand.

In the Satriani case, that would have to be established otherwise, Satriani would lose.

Proving that would have been extremely difficult.

Do you have a citation for it? I'll take a look at it over the next few days. It seems to me that this interpretation has been disfavored if not outright overturned.

I believe the CA courts have adopted the far more strict definition provided earlier, though I'll need to see the citation first.

My quote that you quoted was in response to DJ's Left Nut saying there was no possible "ordinary listener" test. That's why I pulled that part out. Like I said, I was pretty sure I had read Satriani could prove access--because ColdPlay was at one of his shows or something--but its been a while

That's from like 1971. Case law has moved far beyond that.

Alternate, inconsistent pleadings are allowed in every state in the union.

There's no way in hell they'd have staked their entire case on that one particular theory of recovery. They'd have also provided the standard inference arguments as alternate theories which they could fall back on.

As for your other post - it cuts both ways. If you were certain you didn't plagerize and you were a 'megaband' wouldn't you be eager to prove it in court?

Like I said, if the evidence involved didn't at least put a scare into Coldplay's counsel, there's no way they'd have settled it. Would it have been enough to support a verdict? Obviously we'll never know, but there had to be something substantial there in order to survive pre-trial dispositive motions and draw a settlement offer that appears to be significantly more than a mere nuisance settlement.

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I think you're correct here, but a quick keycite would confirm it.

Dude, they gave the guy the song! That's the reason why record companies and music publishers do not allow unsolicited material: They're terrified of copyright lawsuits exactly like this.

Not in this case.

With fans worldwide already extremely fickle, with the fact that Coldplay's own fans believe all their music sounds the same, with declining record sales and with the /Twitter/TMZ age in full-effect, Coldplay (IMO) was smart just to let Capitol Records handle it and move on.

Its from 76. But the "ordinary person" test that Left Nut WRONGLY called my law class out on still exists according to the link I posted (from a quick google search)

Though the case is old, I believe the basic elements are still alive today, being:
(1) Access (i.e. ColdPlay has heard the song) and
(2) substantial similarity to an ordinary listener

Experts are heavily used to determine which parts may have been infringed and how close they are, etc. But the test the jury is to use is whether to an ordinary person they sound substantially similar.

Dane, I never disputed that access was a requirement.

citation is: 420 F.Supp. 177

1 is far more important today than 2.

I mentioned this very early in this thread. Case law has now evolved to the point that Joe Satriani would have to prove that Coldplay heard his song before releasing their song.

Otherwise, it's case dismissed.

1 was important at that time too. The "He's so Fine" song was so popular the court took for granted that Harrison had heard it. But wasn't Coldplay at one of Satriani's shows or something???

Ah, let me re-address as I didn't read this post correctly the first time. The critical component is the bolded part.

Are you still attempting to assert that this can only be provenvia direct evidence? Because that's absolutely not true. In Vassar's case, that's what they attempted to do, but it's certainly not the only way to go about it. As I spent several posts trying to show you the first time around, this can be 'proven' via inference.

I think it's far FAR more than 10% likely that a jury would hear these two songs played together and infer that Coldplay ripped the song from Satriani.

KeyCite only has one case distinguishing it, and that case is from S.D.N.Y.

Here's more from that Scott and Scott website:

"Courts use the substantial similarity test to determine the net impression of the ordinary observer and to decide whether a reasonable, ordinary juror could find, based on the “overall look and feel” of the relevant expressive elements, that the two works are substantially similar."

Dane, you might be right about Satriani being unable to prove access, but if Satriani could show that Coldplay heard the song, these two are definitely similar enough to cause a problem legally, IMO.

But so is Brighttunes, which would be why the case distinguishing it is from the same district. The rest of the legal world doesn't give a rip.

Has this standard been adopted by the California courts? I don't believe it has been.

The Southern District of NY has absolutely no say in what standard to apply here. My recollection is that the standard in California is an intentional misappropriation standard.

In which case, the ordinary person standard is inapplicable.

Could be different in CA...but honestly, I don't care enough to research CA copyright law, so I'll leave that to you guys if you want to hash it out.

I was just making a quick point since I thought it was funny we had just studied this briefly. You called out my class saying there couldn't possibly be an ordinary person standard. Obviously, that standard exists in an least some jurisdictions.

I'm going to bed, lol.

In fairness, I said it couldn't apply if the jurisdiction adopted an intentional malfeasance standard, which is the assumption we were operating under.

Have a good night.

Actually, I decided to find some CA law real quickly, lol.

You still don't have to prove intent:
"Absent direct evidence of copying, proof of infringement involves fact-based showings that the defendant had “access” to the plaintiff's work and that the two works are “substantially similar.”


"Proof of the substantial similarity is satisfied by a two-part test of extrinsic similarity and intrinsic similarity. See Krofft, 562 F.2d at 1164. Initially, the extrinsic test requires that the plaintiff identify concrete elements based on objective criteria. See Smith, 84 F.3d at 1218; Shaw, 919 F.2d at 1356. The extrinsic test often requires analytical dissection of a work and expert testimony. See Apple Computer, Inc. v. Microsoft Corp., 35 F.3d 1435, 1442 (9th Cir.1994). Once the extrinsic test is satisfied, the factfinder applies the intrinsic test. The intrinsic test is subjective and asks “whether the ordinary, reasonable person would find the total concept and feel of the works to be substantially similar.”


Even though you were just operating under an [invalid] assumption, I still think it was rude to say you were "unimpressed" with my class like that.

Anyway, no harm, no foul. I just skimmed the above case quickly, but here's the cite:
212 F.3d 477

You have a good night too.

Closed out the last episode of Fringe.

Is it just me, of does the instrumental/backing of this song sound A LOT like another pre-existing song? At the very least the chord progression.

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For those who can't place what I'm talking about.

I'd agree. It came to mind before I clicked the spoiler link to see what you were thinking.

This Monkeys gone to heaven.

Right band and album, wrong song.

Yes I know, the only song I can remember currently from them though. :D

Umm

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Happens all the time..

Someone did a study breaking down all the big hit songs, Like seven formulas, follow this and you get people loving them from what I remember reading..