Ed Sheeran has beaten a copyright appeal over his hit single Thinking Out Loud.
As reported by Reuters, a US appeals court ruled on Friday (November 1) that Sheeran’s single did not illegally copy Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, siding with a lower-court judge’s prior dismissal of the lawsuit from plaintiff Structured Asset Sales.
The news follows Sheeran’s victory in two back-to-back copyright infringement cases over the past couple of years alleging that his 2014 hit ripped off Marvin Gaye’s 1973 classic track Let’s Get It On.
In May 2023, US District Judge Louis Stanton dismissed the case brought forward by Structured Asset Sales LLC, reversing his original ruling that the lawsuit deserved to be heard by a jury.
Judge Louis Stanton is the same judge who presided over a separate case involving the same tracks by Sheeran and Gaye. The jury in that case ruled in favor of Sheeran against the estate of Ed Townsend, who co-wrote Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On.
SAS sued Sheeran, his label, Warner Music Group, and his music publisher, Sony Music Publishing in 2018 after Townsend’s estate filed its initial lawsuit against the singer. SAS sought $100 million in damages in that case.
The plaintiffs in both cases appealed the rulings, but last September, one of those plaintiffs – the estate of Ed Townsend – withdrew their appeal.
The other plaintiff, Structured Asset Sales LLC, carried on. SAS was founded and led by investment banker David Pullman, best known for inventing “Bowie bonds,” a type of asset-backed security that used royalties from David Bowie’s music sales and live performances as collateral. SAS / Pullman own a share of Townsend’s songwriter interest in Let’s Get It On.
Sheeran’s lawyers previously argued during the Townsend Estate litigation proceedings that the two elements that allegedly copied Gaye’s Let’s Get It On – the song’s chord progression and harmonic rhythm – were so commonplace as to be non-copyrightable “building blocks” of pop music.
The jury in that trial agreed, and sided with Sheeran. Following that ruling, Judge Louis L. Stanton dismissed SAS’s case before it even made it before a jury.
“It is an unassailable reality that the chord progression and harmonic rhythm in Let’s Get It On are so commonplace, in isolation and in combination, that to protect their combination would give Let’s Get It On an impermissible monopoly over a basic musical building block,’ Judge Stanton wrote in the decision siding with Sheeran in the SAS case, which can be read in full here.
“Let’s Get It On‘s chord progression was used at least 29 times before appearing in Let’s Get It On and was in another 23 songs before Thinking Out Loud was released,” the judge added, echoing an argument that defense lawyers had made in the earlier jury trial.
As reported by Reuters today, the appeals court agreed with the earlier decision, noting, according to Reuters, that: ‘protecting the elements could stifle creativity, and that Sheeran’s and Gaye’s songs were not similar enough for Sheeran’s to have infringed on SAS’ copyright’.Music Business Worldwide
