ha! ya think?

whats up! i am back in the freezing cold weather, its 18 F here. i love it. i can't take temperatures over 100 F, but it's true what they say, its. not the heat its the humidity.

renting an apt. for now. now i repeat the whole process over again. wait another 2 months for my shit and try to find a job, and find a decent house to live in.

Well this is an intereresting development isn't it?

My initial thought about the Coldplay video on YT was "who is iGotSpaceLikeNASA"? The person only registered on 17 June. I wondered at the time if someone connected with Joe had registered as a gentle way of pointing out the similarity of the 2 songs - it would seem to be a Joe-style way of doing things wouldn't it? Does anybody know this person?

As someone pointed out, it may not be clear whether if it is Joe's record company, his publishing company or some other entity who has filed the suit. Companies have a fiduciary duty to their shareholders to protect their IP/assets/whatever so it may not have been Joe's call personally.

I also know that, in any jurisdiction, law suits are filed as a last resort, after letters are written and talks are held (or maybe no talks were held if Coldplay's reps ignored the letters) so the two parties have already been in contact and no result has come out of it.

I often think about how many permutations and combinations of notes in a 3 minute song (that sound good) are possible. When will we run out? I once thought about creating a software program that generated combinations of notes ( to different timing and rhythms) to find ones that sounded good to the ear.

This also begs the question about what do composers do at the moment when they write a song, in order to check that it hasn't been written before? Is there a "matching" service that they can check their song against in case someone wrote a similar song in Russia in 1972? How do you cover the risk that you are writing something from your memory or that you once heard when you were 5?

Anyway, I wish Joe all the best in the world with this - court is a last resort and I doubt there are ever true winners.

Do The Stu - any chance you can interview Joe for T2J to get his side of the story?

jdlespaul - WOO HOO an Aussie sammish!!!!!!!!

I knew there were more out there lurking! Tell us about yourself - I'd like to form a posse for Joe's next Aussie tour if people are interested.

I've read all 18 pages (as of now) of that Coldplay thread, and man oh man does it make me love T2J even more. We have a really cool and very respectful community here.

There's a new user, Morpheus, on the Coldplay board who posted something really interesting. Is that someone here, by any chance? He went to a show last month and did the Club Joe thing. Here's a bit from his post:

"I found it interesting when a fellow fan asked Satriani if he thought there were any resemblances between the songs. Satriani, who is a very humble and friendly guy, simply said 'My legal counsel has advised me not to discuss this'."

Joe's also had a link to the YouTube video comparing the tracks on his user page for a while now, so I guess this has been coming... This is sounding more and more like Satch and Coldplay were in fairly friendly talks that turned ugly once the Grammy nominations came in.

I've seen at least one post asking what will happen at the Grammys if Joe wins the lawsuit. I'd have to read the actual filing to be sure, but it depends what Joe is asking for. Most news articles seem to only mention money (damages and profits). So that'd just mean he gets a percentage of the money made on sales and any commercial/other uses. If he's asking for other things though and he wins everything he could end up with a songwriting credit for the song. That would be retroactive, which means he'd get royalties going all the way back to when the song was first released.

Onto the Grammy Awards...the Song Of The Year award goes to the songwriter(s), not the performer. I don't know the Grammy-specific rules, but if this song wins that specific Grammy and Joe goes on to win a co-writing credit in court, he could be awarded the Grammy retroactively.

That'd be a wild way for him to finally get an award, and to be honest I hope it doesn't end up playing out like that.

Anyway, I doubt we'll hear anything about this from Joe or Coldplay until after the lawsuit is resolved, as it's extremely rare for people to comment on current legal proceedings.

But in the meantime...if anyone has any other questions, ask away. I work at a newspaper and as a result I know copyright law inside and out, so I'll do what I can to clear things up around here.

JS_JS - I posted something earlier Friday (click here) that included some of my personal thoughts.

Initially (when this first came up months ago) I thought it was a stretch, but I never actually heard the song until after I heard about the lawsuit. So now I realize the argument is much stronger than I originally thought.

However, I don't think Joe will win. It'll be a jury trial, and I think Coldplay is too popular and likely has a better (bigger) legal team. And we all know Joe is a very nice guy and in the end I just don't think he'll push the issue as much as he could.

This lawsuit was filed here in Los Angeles, so I'll do some digging around at work tomorrow and see if I can come up with some PDFs of the actual legal filing for us to look at. Maybe I'll send a message to our courts reporter and see if she can help me find stuff.