New York partner Oren Warshavsky was quoted in a December 30 MSNBC.com article, "Joe Satriani May Have a Case Against Coldplay."
The focus of the article is the copyright infringement lawsuit recently filed by guitarist Joe Satriani against British rock band Coldplay. Satriani has accused the band of ripping off one of his instrumentals, claiming Coldplay's hit single "Viva La Vida" incorporates substantial original portions of his 2004 song "If I Could Fly." Coldplay has denied the accusation, saying any similarities were entirely coincidental.
The article references another music plagiarism case in which Corey Glover, lead singer of the band Living Colour, was asked in 1998 to write two songs for the pop group TLC. In 1999, TLC released a song called “Unpretty,” which to Glover sounded very much like one of the songs he and his writing partner had written for the group. It was only in August of this year that Glover and his writing partner 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.
According to the article, it's difficult to define what constitutes a typical case of music plagiarism, as it could be anything from outright stealing, to an artist or artists unconsciously taking a song from another source, to pure coincidence.
"The important point is whether there was access,” said Warshavsky, 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."
Said Warshavsky, "What the second author, Coldplay, has to show is that they had not heard the Joe Satriani song. 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."