A New York jury has ruled that Ed Shireen did not infringe on the copyrights of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.”
The copyright infringement lawsuit which captured the imagination of the world music industry was brought by the heirs of Marvin Gaye’s co-writer Ed Townsend, claiming that the British singer plagiarized “Let’s Get It On” in his superhit song “Thinking Out Loud.”
Marvin Gaye (1939-84) was a two-time Grammy Award-winning R&B singer, known lovingly as the “Prince of Motown” for popularizing the sounds of Motown in the 1960s.
Sheeran had earlier claimed that he would give up music if he loses the case. “Thinking Out Loud” won the 2014 Grammy Award.
Sheeran told the press outside the court that he was “very happy” with the jury verdict.
“If the jury had decided this matter the other way, we might as well say goodbye to the creative freedom of songwriters,” Sheeran said.
Heirs of Marvin Gaye won copyrights claim against Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke in 2015 over the song “Blurred Lines.”
Sheeran claimed in court that the 1-3-4-5 progression used in the song is not a rip-off from Marvin Gaye but a common “foundational” building block that could not be owned by anyone.
“No one owns them, or the way they are played, in the same way nobody owns the color blue,” Sheeran told the jury while playing the guitar for them in his statement.
Joe Bennet, a forensic musicologist at Berklee College of Music commented about the verdict to the AFP as follows: “In music copyright litigation, cases involving one or two bars of music, the plaintiff’s allegation of plagiarism is almost always wrong,” he said. “Coincidental similarity happens all the time, particularly with chords and short melodic fragments.”
“Hopefully this sensible verdict will discourage other spurious complaints.”
