Bartleby

As I was composing an email to Carly I had to pause to look up the difference between instinctive and instinctual. As it turns out, "These are synonyms, both meaning 'caused by or characterized by instinct,' but instinctive is much more often employed; instinctual is rare, except in Britain." This definition is taken from The Columbia Guide to Standard American English.

I enjoyed that explanation for its clarity and conciseness, so I explored Bartleby.com, the website on which I found it. Bartleby is a website that hosts online copies of books. Their reference section seems pretty useful. Also, the books are posted in what appears to be HTML, meaning they could easily be copied [by some obviously nefarious character] into a format readable by certain digital reading devices; I'm not encouraging it, just noting it.

Coldplay steal the show...and a song.

Long story short, Coldplay seems to have written the song "Viva la Vida" by simply copying the Joe Satriani song "If I Could Fly." Originally Joe Satriani planned to serve Coldplay with a copyright infringement lawsuit at the Grammys by hiring a bunch of servers to scour the venue. In the end, Satriani's lawyer was contacted by a lawyer representing the band who said he would accept the papers without the drama of a Grammy-night hunt for the band.

Here's a YouTube video that plays relevant sections of both Coldplay's "Viva la Vida" and Joe Satriani's "If I Could Fly." Satriani's song is from his 2004 album Is There Love In Space?, while Coldplay's is from their 2008 album Viva la Vida or Death and All His Friends.

For reference: the complete Coldplay song; the complete Satriani song.

For those of you interested in the music theory behind this claim here are two videos in which a guy from Creative Guitar Studios in California analyzes the theoretical similarities between the two songs. Video 1. Video 2.

Satriani is suing for any and all profits related to the copyright infringement, and considering the popularity of "Viva la Vida" he stands to gain quite nicely from this (especially when one considers the bump in name recognition for Satriani).