I've never heard of the band Unfaith, but I ran across this today.........


MONTREAL — Metallica are taking legal action against independant Canadian rock band Unfaith over what they feel is unsanctioned usage of two chords the band has been using since 1982 : E and F.

"People are going to get on our case again for this, but try to see it from our point of view just once," stated Metallica's Lars Ulrich. "We're not saying we own those two chords, individually - that would be ridiculous. We're just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music."

Metallica filed a trademark infringement suit against the indie group at the US district court for central California on Monday. According to the drummer, the continued use of the two chords causes "confusion, deception and mistake in the minds of the public".

Metallica's lawyer, Jill Pietrini, told us that the band decided to take legal action only after first sending a letter of complaint to the Canadian band's singer/songwriter, Erik Ashley.

"We sent a demand letter and haven't reached a resolution, so we had to sue," she said. "They continue to shamelessly feature the two chords on their website song samples and we just can't have that."

Ashley, in the meantime, is still shocked by the entire story, and hasn't yet decided how the band will respond.

"I thought it was a prank at first," he told us. "Now I'm not sure what to think."

Ulrich states that he's not trying to prevent Unfaith from using the two chords, only that he feels Metallica should be credited for them whenever used, and is calling for 50% of all revenue generated from any song using them.

"It's nothing personal against them," he added. "We intend to enforce our rights with any band intending to use Metallica-branded chords in the future."

This marks the first time anything of this kind has ever been tried in court, and it will be interesting to see how things develop.


.............somebody's got too much time on their hands......

   

Metallica= lame f**kin idiots... maybe elvis will sue them cause they are using Guitars like he did....Only in California buddy.........

   

Metallica's done some great music but man GROW THE HELL UP!

   

Great, now I hate Metallica even more!

   

Personaly I'm a fan of Metallica, but I agree that they do really need to grow up. talk about sanctimonious or what?

   

Metallica is just getting old. They know their music isn't as good as it used to be and isn't selling nearly as well. They'll never match their records set by the black album and they're just desperate to stay in the friggin lime light. Just a bunch of geriatric old farts following the american way. losers...

   

Acually, that 'news' story turned out to be a gag. It even fooled the associated press which is rare!

   

Well Robair, if the news story was a gag, how did I cut and paste it from Metallica's web site???

I was a longtime fan, started listening to them in 1983, but after the latest crap they've released I'll start spending my money on other CD's.

In a related story, I have a copy of St. Anger that I'll sell to any takers out there for $5.00 plus shipping............

   

(Court TV) -- Radio stations and Web sites were flooded yesterday with news that the seminal heavy metal band, Metallica, had launched yet another lawsuit to protect its music from theft. This time, the rock pioneers were purportedly suing a Canadian band called Unfaith for trademark infringement over the use of a "Metallica-branded" chords E and F.

The only problem: The story was a ruse.

"That's a hoax," Metallica's Los Angeles-based lawyer, Jill Pietrini, told Courttv.com.

Freelance commercial designer and aspiring musician Erik Ashley, 29, cleverly concocted the scam which sent users to an MTV.com story about the suit, which included a link to a fictional response from the band.

"We're not saying we own those two chords, individually," said drummer Lars Ulrich in Ashley's spoof.

"That would be ridiculous," the faux quote continued. "We're just saying that in that specific order, people have grown to associate E, F with our music."

Ashley even tossed in a barb from Metallica's lawyer, Pietrini, for added realism.

"They continue to shamelessly feature the two chords on their Web site song samples and we just can't have that," he wrote.

Exhausted after a day of fielding calls from dozens of newspapers and radio stations (including National Public Radio) as well as The Onion and Rolling Stone magazine, the Montreal, Canada resident told Courttv.com that he never expected the ruse to catch on.

"It has taken on a life of its own," said Ashley, who ran a spoof Web site, SpoofThis.com, from 1997 to 2000. "Our server crashed 3 times today ... The hits are already well over 100,000 visits."

The viral spread of Ashley's ruse sent tremors through message-board communities, where some members were shocked, some nonplussed, and some incredulous.

Judging by many of the posted messages, Metallica's yen for lawsuits helped the spoof take wing.

"I'm not sure what's worse, that the story is a fake, or that it was actually conceivable that Metallica would do that," said one boarder with the nickname TANSTAAFL.

That was part of Ashley's motivation.

"We all know about the Napster issue, the perfume company, the tire makers, Metallica has sued them all," he said. "The idea behind this parody was to gauge just how much their reputation has suffered as a result of the suits. Would people go so far as to believe that something this extraordinary, this outlandish, could conceivably be true?"

Apparently so. A spokesperson for the band's record label, Elektra, declined to comment.

While Ashley's ruse was clever, it was not impossible to detect.

Neither the MTV story nor the supposed Metallica response were hosted on the network's or band's own servers, but were distributed from Ashley's ScoopThis.com server.

And a quick review of songs available on Unfaith's official Web site (actually just Ashley's one-man band) would make even a casual listener skeptical of Ulrich's supposed claim of "confusion" and "deception."

Whereas Metallica sings about dark themes like death and suicide in songs like "Sanitarium," "Kill 'em All," and "Unforgiven," Unfaith's poppy Christian rock tunes feature decidedly un-Metallica lyrics like "I wanna be Jesus now/Let me be your Jesus now" over techno and guitar-flavored riffs.

A quick search of the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office's online database turned up registrations for Metallica branded footballs, Metallica-branded sweatshirts and sunglasses -- but no "Metallica-branded chords."

And, as one legal expert told Courttv.com, Ashley's notion that the E-F chord progression constituted trademark infringement, rather than copyright infringement, may not have stood up in court, either.

Such a song structure issue "typically in the province of copyright law, which relates to any type of artistic expression fixed in a tangible medium," said Michael Friedman, an entertainment/intellectual property partner with the New York firm Jenkens & Gilchrist Parker Chapin.

Still, the scheme was clever enough to work, largely because Ashley carefully reproduced the design templates used by the MTV.com and Metallica Web sites. To the casual observer, the sites were indistinguishable from the real ones.

"Getting all of the links working was the hardest part," he said. "If you click on the option to post on the MTV.com message board about this story, the link would actually take you there to the real thing."

Ashley even quoted himself in the fake MTV.com story. "I thought it was a prank at first," he had himself say, playing David to Metallica's Goliath. "Now I'm not sure what to think."

One might think Ashley's publicity would spur his budding music career, but he calls it just a "hobby." Ashley says he's more worried about finding a full-time job, and that the spoof will probably end up costing him money in bandwidth.

But it's a fair trade-off for him.

"I may be reaching here, but I wouldn't put it past Lars to actually approve of the parody because it exposes the Internet for what it is," he said, meaning the kind of place where even legitimate news sites might run with the story without a second thought.

"The real irony," said Ashley, "is that none of our songs use E and F in that order."

   

I thought this was August not April LMAo

   

The irony of it is...your going to see it show up in court somewhere with another band before long....copycat lawsuits...pasit03fat

   

Christ, I honestly beleived that one...