Ed Sheeran has been sued for a second time over allegations that his song Thinking Out Loud rips off Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On.
A company called Structured Asset Sales, which owns part of the copyright of Gaye’s song, is suing Sheeran for $100m (£76.4m), alleging that his 2014 single copies “the melody, rhythms, harmonies, drums, bass line, backing chorus, tempo, syncopation and looping” of Gaye’s 1973 hit.
Structured Asset Sales was founded by the investment banker David Pullman, who in the late 1990s invited musicians to sell off their future income in exchange for money upfront. David Bowie, James Brown and the Isley Brothers were among his clients.
Pullman claims to have done a deal with the son of Gaye’s late co-writer, Ed Townsend Jr, and says he owns a part of the song and therefore a stake in the litigation, reports the Hollywood Reporter. A judge rejected its initial motion for intervention on 11 June. Structured Asset Sales then filed a fresh lawsuit repeating the claim of copyright infringement.
Defendants listed in the new claim include Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Atlantic Records and co-writer Amy Wadge. The Guardian has contacted Atlantic for comment.
The suit follows another against Thinking Out Loud filed in August 2016 by the family of Townsend Jr, claiming “the melodic, harmonic and rhythmic: compositions of Thinking are substantially and/or strikingly similar to the drum composition of Let’s”. The BBC reported that it was unclear whether that case had been resolved. Sheeran has segued Thinking Out Loud into Let’s Get It On in concert.
Thinking Out Loud, which reached No 1 in November 2014, is not the only Sheeran work that has faced legal action over alleged similarities to other songs. In January this year two songwriters, Sean Carey and Beau Golden, filed a lawsuit accusing the singer of stealing the melody from their song When I Found You, sung by Australian artist Jasmin Rae, and using it for The Rest of Our Life, which Sheeran wrote for the country artists Faith Hill and Tim McGraw. Sheeran responded with court documents denying any similarity between the two songs.
In June 2016 two more musicians, Martin Harrington and Thomas Leonard, claimed Sheeran’s 2014 single Photograph had the same musical composition as their song Amazing, performed and released by the X Factor winner Matt Cardle in 2012. Sheeran settled the claim, and the terms of the deal were not disclosed. Harrington and Leonard were represented by the lawyer Richard Busch, who successfully sued Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for copyright infringement over their single Blurred Lines in 2015, winning a $7.4m (£5.1m) settlement.
The Blurred Lines case has led to many artists crediting minor resemblances in their songs in order to avoid potential lawsuits. In March 2017, two weeks after Sheeran released his third album, ÷, he added three new songwriting credits to his No 1 single Shape Of You, crediting the writing and production team behind TLC’s 1999 single No Scrubs.
Taylor Swift acknowledged Right Said Fred as co-writers on her 2017 comeback single Look What You Made Me Do, which was said to resemble the British duo’s 1991 single I’m Too Sexy. In 2016, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig described the granular process of inspiration that led to the Yeah Yeah Yeahs receiving a credit on Beyoncé’s Hold Up, a song he initially wrote with producer Diplo.
- This story was amended on 29 June to correct the spelling of the name of Sheeran’s co-writer, Amy Wadge.
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