Judge rules Mariah Carey did not steal All I Want For Christmas Is You
A US judge has ruled that Mariah Carey did not steal her perennial mega-hit, All I Want for Christmas Is You, from other songwriters.
Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani granted Carey’s request for summary judgement on Thursday, giving her and co-writer and co-defendant Walter Afanasieff a victory without going to trial.
In 2023, songwriters Andy Stone of Louisiana — who goes by the stage name Vince Vance — and Troy Powers of Tennessee filed the US$20 million ($32 million) lawsuit alleging that Carey’s 1994 song, which has since become a holiday standard and annual streaming sensation, infringed the copyright of their 1989 country song with the same title.
It was the second time Stone sued over the song, after he withdrew a 2022 case.
Their lawyer Gerard P. Fox said he was “disappointed” in an email to The Associated Press.
Fox said it is his experience that judges at this level “nearly always now dismiss a music copyright case and that one must appeal to reverse and get the case to the jury.”
“My client will make a decision shortly on whether to appeal. We filed based on the opinions of two esteemed musicologists who teach at great colleges,” he said.
Stone and Powers’ suit said their All I Want For Christmas Is You song contains a unique linguistic structure where a person, disillusioned with expensive gifts and seasonal comforts, wants to be with their loved one, and accordingly writes a letter to Santa Claus.”
They said there was an “overwhelming likelihood” Carey and Afanasieff had heard their song — which at one point reached No.31 on Billboard’s Hot Country chart — and infringed their copyright by taking significant elements from it.
After hearing from two experts for each side, Judge Ramírez Almadani agreed with those from the defence, who said the writers employed common Christmas cliches that existed prior to both songs, and that Carey’s song used them differently.
She said the plaintiffs had not met the bar of showing that the songs were substantially similar.
Judge Ramírez Almadani also ordered sanctions against the plaintiffs and their lawyers, saying their suit and subsequent filings were frivolous and that the plaintiffs’ lawyers “made no reasonable effort to ensure that the factual contentions asserted have evidentiary support”.
She said they must pay at least part of the defendants’ legal fees.
Lawyers for the defence and publicists for Carey did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Carey’s Christmas colossus has become an even bigger hit in recent years than it was in the 1990s. During the holiday season, it has reached number one on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart — which measures the most popular songs by airplay, sales and streaming — the past six years in a row.
The future of copyright infringement
Queensland University of Technology music lecturer Dr Yanto Browning said the law made these types of cases challenging.
“It’s hard to copyright a chord progression, for example,” Dr Browning said.
Musicians Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke were successfully sued by the estate of Marvin Gaye in 2015 after they claimed Williams’ and Thicke’s song Blurred Lines infringed on Gaye’s 1977 track Got To Give It Up.
Dr Browning said such lawsuits could be based on lyrical and melodic content, and also a more overarching style or “vibe”.
“It’s almost like the textual components as much as the chordal and the lyrical ideas,” he said.
“I think it’s part of the law that is really quite open to interpretation.“
A jury found Williams and Thicke’s song Blurred Lines infringed on Marvin Gaye’s 1977 song Got To Give It Up in 2015. (Reuters: Rick Wilking)
Dr Browing said the situation was unlikely to get easier in the future, with the rise of generative artificial intelligence.
“Whatever happens next with artificial intelligence and copyright is really where all the attention is going to go,”
he said.
Dr Browning expected individual cases would become increasingly insignificant, taking a back seat to copyright infringement claims that centre on the use of existing music to train AI companies’ large language models.
“Now you can go into AI generators and just say ‘Give me a folk song in the mould of …’ and then that’s been trained on all of these other artists,” he said.
“But there’s no talk of, how do you remunerate an entire genre?”
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