Stop Me If You've Heard This One Before
Are Coldplay Guilty of Plagiarism?
Coldplay are refuting claims that the melody from ‘Viva La Vida' was copied from a song by indie rockers the Creaky Boards. The Brooklyn-based band state that Coldplay ripped off the melody from their ironically, and perhaps prophetically, named track ‘The Songs I Didn't Write' and they've put together a video comparing the two to prove it. In the video, Creaky Board frontman Andrew Hoepfner also claims that Chris Martin was spotted in the crowd at one of their gigs in 2007. In an interview with Rolling Stone magazine last year, Chris Martin has admitted to plagiarising many, if not most, of the songs he wrote.
"We're definitely good, but I don't think you can say we're that original," he notes. "I regard us as being incredibly good plagiarists."
They're not the first British band to get in trouble for borrowing melodies. Coldplay's former label mates Radiohead settled out of court with 60s beat band The Hollies over their top ten hit ‘Creep'. Albert Hammond and Mike Hazelwood claimed the Radiohead song ‘Creep' followed a similar chord pattern to The Hollies' ‘The Air That I Breathe'. Hammond and Hazelwood now share a similar portion of the songwriting credits and royalties.
Cold play do it better.
No offence to creaky board but you just have not got Joe Wylie biggin you up.
Isn't art, regardless of what medium you practice, influenced by what we see/hear around us?. If I design a piece of jewellery that was inspired by a tree that I saw while walking in a National Trust forest, do they get a proceed from the sale of that jewellery?
Hmmm...
They are a small indie band but what better way to promote yourself than off the back of a massive band like coldplay?
Creaky Boards verse is a sequence of identical notes followed by a note lower and then a note higher.
Coldplays (and many other songs) also consists of a sequence of identical notes, but then followed by a note higher and then a note lower. The chorus sounds completely different.
Just because the verse has a repeated note where the pitch doesn't change this could not been seen as copying. Back to treading those Creaky boards for them as they won't have a hope of winning this claim !
But hey that my view.
Cheers