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...

In Facebook, Inc. v. Power Ventures, Inc., the US District Court for the Northern District of California denied defendant Power Ventures's motion to dismiss Facebook's copyright infringement claim arising out of Power Ventures's unauthorized harvesting of data from Facebook user accounts.  Power Ventures operates a website designed to integrate various social networking or email accounts into a single portal. After a user provides his or her user names and passwords to Power Ventures's service (power.com), it takes this access information to “scrape” user data from those accounts.  Subsequently, the user can log on to Power.com to view the data culled from Facebook and any other social networking sites or email accounts.

Power Ventures commenced licensing negotiations with Facebook to authorize its data scraping activity.  After negotiations broke down, Facebook brought suit claiming, among other things, that Power Ventures's actions violated the Copyright Act.  Power Ventures moved to dismiss, arguing that Facebook does not have a copyright interest in the content posted by its users.

The court agreed with Power Ventures that Facebook does not have a copyright on user content, which ultimately is the information that Power Ventures software seeks to extract.  The court stated further, however, that Power Ventures's making a copy of a user’s entire Facebook profile page in order to collect that user content,  could constitute infringement of Facebook’s copyright interest in the collection and arrangement of the user content in the form of the profile page.  Accordingly, the court denied Power Venture's motion to dismiss Facebook's copyright infringement claim.

This case may provide further ammunition to site owners in their attempts to thwart unauthorized collection of site user data, even where the site user has granted permission and the site owner does not actually own the data.

On June 13th, Facebook will begin implementing a new policy that allows trademark owners to preemptively block others from using their registered trademarks as user names on its site.  Under the new policy trademark owners may record their trademarks with Facebook in order to prevent use of the marks by third parties. This new policy appears to supplement the existing policy which allows trademark owners to request Facebook remove trademarked user names that already illegally be used by a third party.

It's nice to see Facebook jump in here to take prempetive action against trademark abuse.  Facebook, Twitter and other social network sites have long been a haven for trademark abuse and misuse. Perhaps others will now follow Facebook's lead and take similar action.  Those who own trademarks would be wise to preemptively record their registered word marks with Facebook in advance of the June 13th policy change.