Ed Sheeran Wins Copyright Case Over Marvin Gaye’s ‘Let’s Get It On’
After that, Ms. Townsend said that she respected the jury’s decision and that she had defended her father’s legacy.
“I stood up for my father’s intellectual properties,” she said. “I was up against an army.”
She also said that she was glad to finally have the opportunity to speak one-on-one with Mr. Sheeran, and that he had invited her to a show on his tour, which opens on Saturday. “If we had been able to just talk,” she said, “we wouldn’t be here today.”
The case, which was filed in 2017 and had been delayed in part by the coronavirus pandemic, involved questions of originality in pop music, and whether the use of basic musical elements, like chord progressions and simple rhythmic patterns, can be owned by a single creator or are free for any musician to use and adapt.
These questions have been tested in a series of recent cases that have stoked fears among musicians that the line between inspiration and plagiarism was being muddied. In a decision in 2015 that shook the business, Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams’s song “Blurred Lines” was found to have infringed Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up.” Five years later, the tide turned: Led Zeppelin won an appeals court victory over its megahit “Stairway to Heaven,” and the judges provided guidance about how copyright applies to works involving “commonplace elements.”
In Mr. Sheeran’s case, the plaintiffs argued that even if elements like chords may not be under copyright individually, their “selection and arrangement” on “Let’s Get It On” was original and distinctive enough to warrant protection. Mr. Sheeran’s side responded that the plaintiffs’ case did not pass the high legal bar required for such protection.
At times, Mr. Sheeran, who has faced litigation stemming from accusations of copying twice before, grew vexed and combative at the stand.
Source: The New York Times
