A 2014 video of Ed Sheeran’s on-stage mashup of his song “Thinking Out Loud” and Marvin Gaye’s classic “Let’s Get It On” is a “smoking gun” and a “confession” of plagiarism, a lawyer representing the plaintiffs in a civil case against him said Tuesday.
On the stand, Sheeran countered that “most pop songs can fit over most pop songs,” using the Beatles’ “Let It Be” and Bob Marley’s “No Woman, No Cry” as well as Van Morrison's "Crazy Love" and Lewis Capaldi’s "Someone You Loved" as examples, according to reporting.
“If I had done what you’re accusing me of doing, I’d be a quite an idiot to stand on a stage in front of 20,000 people and do that.”
Sheeran said he first heard “Let’s Get It On” in the 1999 comedy Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me.
The estate of Ed Townsend Jr., who co-wrote 1973’s “Let’s Get It On”, filed a lawsuit against Sheeran in 2016 over what it called “striking similarities” and “overt common elements” between it and Sheeran’s 2014 hit “Thinking Out Loud.”
(The case was dismissed in February 2017 due to improper service of papers but was successfully refiled in July 2017.)
Lawyers representing Sheeran argued that the two songs share “versions of a similar and unprotectable chord progression that was freely available to all songwriters.”
Sheeran’s lawyer Ilene S. Farkas echoed this in the New York City courtroom. “No one owns basic musical building blocks,” she said.
Townsend’s daughter Kathryn Griffin Townsend testified that she was not a “copyright troll” and filed the lawsuit reluctantly in order to “protect my father’s legacy.”
She called Sheeran “a great artist with a great future.”
Another lawsuit over "Thinking Out Loud," filed in 2018, is pending. Last September, Stanton rejected a motion to dismiss, writing: “There is no bright-line rule that the combination of two unprotectable elements is insufficiently numerous to constitute an original work. A work may be copyrightable even though it is entirely a compilation of unprotectable elements."
Last April, Sheeran beat a 2019 plagiarism lawsuit filed over his song “Shape Of You.” After an 11-day trial in London, a judge ruled that even though there were “similarities” between the song and one by Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue, Sheeran and co-writers Johnny McDaid and Steve McCutcheon “neither deliberately nor subconsciously” copied the melody.
After the verdict, Sheeran complained that claims of copyright infringement “are way too common now” and are “really damaging to the songwriting industry.” He added: “There are only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music. Coincidence is bound to happen. This really does have to end.”
(Last June, Sheeran, McDaid and McCutcheon were awarded nearly $1.5 million in legal costs.)
In 2018, Sheeran settled a copyright infringement lawsuit from songwriters who alleged that his 2014 hit “Photograph” was a “note-for-note copying” of their 2009 song “Amazing.” That same year, two songwriters filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sheeran that claimed the melody of “The Rest Of Our Life” – which Sheeran wrote for country stars Tim McGraw and Faith Hill – is ripped from their song “When I Found You.” The case was later settled.