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Business News Legal
New York judge throws out Muse Exogenesis lawsuit
By Chris Cooke | Published on Wednesday 3 April 2013
A New York judge has thrown out a lawsuit that targeted Warner Music over the 2009 Muse album ‘The Resistance’.
As previously reported, an American songwriter called Charles Bollfrass claimed last year that the last three tracks on that album, a trilogy under the title of ‘Exogenesis’, were ripped off from a concept he had devised in 2005 for a rock opera of the same name.
The claimant went on to allege that he had approached Muse about them collaborating on the rock opera project, but that they declined the offer, and then used his ideas for ‘Exogenesis’. But the band called the claims “complete nonsense”, and denied having previous knowledge of Bollfrass or his 2005 project.
The judge bounced Bollfrass’s lawsuit this week, ruling that the ‘plot’ described by the three disputed Muse tracks was too abstract to constitute any sort of infringement of the songwriter’s rock opera screenplay, even if the band had been previously exposed to the claimant’s work.