Ed Sheeran is heading to trial over his “Thinking Out Loud” song that is accused of copyright infringement by Marvin Gaye’s co-writer on “Let’s Get It On.”
“The Defendants copied the ‘heart’ of ‘Let’s’ and repeated it continuously throughout ‘Thinking,’” the 2016 lawsuit claimed. “The melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic compositions of ‘Thinking’ are substantially and/or strikingly similar to the drum composition of ‘Let’s.’” (In 2019, the Townsend estate’s lawsuit was ultimately postponed by the judge because he wanted to wait for the resolution of a similar case against Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”)
On Thursday, Sheeran’s lawyers argued, in their attempt to have the lawsuit thrown out, that the song elements in question were too common to be protected by copyright and that the lawsuit was “baseless,” the BBC reported.
“There is no bright-line rule that the combination of two unprotectable elements is insufficiently numerous to constitute an original work,” Judge Louis Stanton wrote in his decision. “A work may be copyrightable even though it is entirely a compilation of unprotectable elements.”
– Excerpt from an article for Rolling Stone by Daniel Kreps. Read the full article here.
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