So, Bono from U2 was here at Yahoo! yesterday (here’s the Flickr photo). As I’ve mentioned here before, we had Mark Hosler of Negativland pay us a visit barely a month ago. For the uninitiated, Mark and Negativland were sued by U2 for copyright infringement (see the Negativland entry in Wikipedia for details) in one of the landmark copyright suits in the history of pop music (I’d put it up right there with George Harrison being sued for copyright infringement for appropriating the melody of the Chiffon’s “He’s So Fine” for his song “My Sweet Lord”). They lost the suit.
If you were to super-impose the Bono photo on the Mark Hosler photo in this blog post (they were both in the exact same lobby — building D on the Yahoo! Sunnyvale campus), Mark would be mock-saluting Bono from behind. I wonder if it would have been a slightly different “salute.” Now that would have made a good photo.
Chad Dickerson's blog 
Just this morning (Nov 14, 2005) I got to read this post. Funny, I was actually thinking about the George Harrison suit yesterday morning. I can see a slight similarity between the melody of his Buddha praise song and that of the Chiffon song but no way should he have lost that suit.
What brought this thought pattern on was considering the time when Brian May got some money out of Vanilla Ice for the ‘Ice Ice Baby’ diddy. At the time (in my more Liberal days) I thought it was so wrong of May (music should be free! 😀 although I will never admit I liked ‘Ice Ice Baby’), but yes, Vanilla Ice did rip off the track and Queen/David Bowie deserved their share.
Later, Vanilla Ice tried to deny the rip-off in an interview (you can see this one occasionally on VH1’s Behind the Music — it is truly a laugher). He claimed it was missing one note and therefore was not the same bass line.
Enough banter. Chad, did you take this photo of Bono? I did notice that it was on someone else’s Flikr page. Bono has indeed come a long way since the days of ‘Live at Red Rocks’ when he used to march with the white flag during the playing of ‘Sunday Bloody Sunday.’ Ahh the days of the revolution! Then they moved on to Zooropa and other stuff — not the same U2, but hardly anyone today can touch their level of talent.