I return to you from a lengthy absence but not to talk about games. I might as well dispel the inevitable suspicion that I'm leaving, which isn't true. I'm far less active and less interested in this site and games in general that I used to be, but neither one of those things is going away just yet. Nevertheless, I felt like voicing my personal opinion on a bit of recent controversy and irrelevant as it may be here, I figured a few of you might be interested.

Recently, Coldplay has been accused of plagiarizing their hit "Viva la Vida" from Joe Satriani's "If I could Fly". This seems strange because all of Satriani's music is instrumental where Coldplay use lyrics to get their message across. Listening to each song separately, they sound a bit similar, but it's hard to say that plagiarism is involved. Lots of music sounds similar, and accusing Coldplay just seems nitpicky. I didn't think so initially, but after the songs are played together viva la vida does serve to be a perfect backing track for learning to fly.

Still, I'm not sure that one exact chord progression can really be copyrighted. I mean, if every technical aspect of music began to be copyrighted so that anything similar was punishable under copyright infringement we would eventually start to run our of music. There's only so much you can do that's completely original and new without using similar musical ideas from another artist. Music has always been influenced by past musicians with an admirable $tyles and persistent lawsuits over something that sounds similar would simply lead to less commercial music releases.

That would be just like car companies copyrighting every exact measurement of their vehicles and suing any competitors who made a car that matched some of those specifications. Or Nintendo suing a story driven adventure game (even though that genre may be less popular than it once was) for using many of the same elements that made Ocarina of Time such a great game. As soon as anybody comes up with a formula for something that is successful, bits and pieces of it are going to be taken and transformed to make something different and arguing that the formula is yours and yours alone is a futile endeavor.

As for Coldplay, their song does sound eerily like Satriani's, but I don't think that was intentional. They most likely just made up that chord progression in the studio, liked it and built a song around it just like Satriani did.

Anyways, that's my opinion on the issue, and hopefully I will be able to get back here a little more often than I have and catch up on everything I've missed.

Later,

~James