Despite Ed Sheeran’s court victories last year in which he successfully fended off accusations that his hit song Thinking Out Loud copied Marvin Gaye’s iconic song Let’s Get It On, one of the cases may yet find itself back in court.
The owner of part of the rights to Let’s Get It On is asking an appeals court to overturn one of last year’s court rulings, arguing that a new Supreme Court decision means the previous ruling in the case no longer applies.
Last summer, Sheeran won two lawsuits in a New York federal court in which he was accused of ripping off Let’s Get It On. One of those lawsuits was brought by Structured Asset Sales (SAS), a company founded and led by David Pullman, known for being one of the early innovators of music-backed bonds. The company owns part of the publishing rights to Let’s Get It On.
In May 2023, US District Court Judge Louis Stanton dismissed SAS’s case, overturning an earlier decision to bring the case to trial. That ruling came a few weeks after a jury in another trial presided over by Judge Stanton had concluded that Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud didn’t infringe the copyright on Let’s Get It On.
SAS appealed that decision and argued before the Second Circuit Court of Appeal that Judge Stanton had erred by barring SAS’s musicology experts from testifying and relying instead on the “deposit copy” of the song filed with the US Copyright Office.
Until 1978, the Copyright Office didn’t accept recorded music in song copyright registrations and required sheet music to be filed. Let’s Get It On was released in 1973.
The sheet music for Let’s Get It On doesn’t include the bass line that SAS claims Sheeran copied in Thinking Out Loud. The company planned to bring in experts who would testify that musicians would interpret the sheet music to include a bass line that is the same as the one on Let’s Get It On.
The three-judge panel of the Second Circuit court rejected SAS’s argument, deferring to the US Copyright Office’s interpretation of the law, which is that only those elements of a song that are included in the deposit copy can be protected.
That’s in line with a principle that courts use government agencies’ interpretation of the law in their rulings. The principle was established by the 1984 Supreme Court ruling in Chevron USA v. Natural Resources Defense Council. In that decision, the top court decided that, when there is an ambiguity in the wording of a law, courts must use the…
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