Ed Sheeran just won his second court case in less than two weeks. A federal jury recently ruled that Ed Sheeran‘s 2014 single “Thinking Out Loud” did not contain elements of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On,” the English musician has won a second legal battle over the two songs. According to court documents obtained by Pitchfork, Louis L. Stanton of the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York dismissed a complaint filed against Sheeran and others in 2018 by Structured Asset Sales, LLC (SAS), whose CEO, David Pullman, owns one-third of Ed Townsend’s repertoire. Townsend wrote “Let’s Get It On” with Marvin Gaye, and Pullman received a piece of the song’s copyright. Townsend’s family filed the other major complaint against Sheeran.
SAS claimed in the complaint seen by Pitchfork that “Thinking Out Loud” violated the copyright of the sheet music for “Let’s Get It On.” Other instances of claimed duplication were also documented in the case, including comparisons of the songs’ chord progressions, time signatures, bass lines, and other aspects. Sheeran “had a swift and unexpected rise as an international music sensation in less than eighteen (18) months as a direct result of the commercial success of the publication of “Thinking Out Loud,” according to SAS.
Judge Stanton reached the same conclusion as the jury in Sheeran’s trial earlier this month, dismissing the case with prejudice. “It is an unassailable reality that the chord progression and harmonic rhythm in ‘Let’s Get It On’ are so commonplace, both in isolation and in combination, that protecting their combination would give ‘Let’s Get It On’ an impermissible monopoly over a basic musical building block,” Stanton wrote in the filing.
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