2023-05-04 17:19:12
Where does musical creation stop and where does plagiarism begin? The king of British pop Ed Sheeran comes to the end of a civil lawsuit in New York, attacked for a song which he would have partly copied from Marvin Gaye.
• Read also: Ed Sheeran wins plagiarism case
• Read also: Ed Sheeran threatens to end his career if found guilty of plagiarism
• Read also: Accused of plagiarism, Ed Sheeran takes his guitar and sings in court
The consequences of the outcome of the trial could extend to the rest of musical creation, at the risk of “cooling” artists, warn some musicologists and lawyers.
A jury in federal court in Manhattan must determine whether or not Ed Sheeran’s 2014 global hit “Thinking Out Loud” is a plagiarism of the prince of soul’s famous “Let’s Get It On” in 1973.
The plaintiffs in this emblematic musical copyright case are the heirs of Ed Townsend, an American musician and producer who co-wrote the song with Marvin Gaye.
They point to “striking similarities and obvious common elements” between the two songs.
This is the second trial in a year for the 32-year-old British singer and songwriter, who in April 2022 won a separate court battle at the High Court in London, which dismissed two musicians accusing him of having copied one of their works for his mega hit “Shape Of You”.
Getty Images via AFP
guitar in court
Sheeran, who has been attending the New York hearings since April 24, even had to play guitar and sing in court as a token of good faith.
Quoted by the prosecution, a musicologist has indeed declared that the chord progression on the two songs was almost identical.
The pop musician therefore played in court the four key chords of “Thinking Out Loud”, ensuring that they were very different from those in “Let’s Get It On”.
The British artist also said he wrote his hit in 2014 with his musical partner Amy Wadge while “getting out of the shower” at home. The song peaked at number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and won the Grammy Award for Best Song in 2016.
The risk of the Sheeran trial, experts fear, is the proliferation of copyright disputes and a form of “paranoia” that would develop among musicians terrified of copying each other.
“Sheer coincidence”
“The world I want to live in is one where no one sue anyone for melodic or harmonic similarities, because they can easily arise by coincidence,” Joe Bennett, a musicologist at Berklee College of Music, told AFP. Massachusetts (northeastern United States).
“It shouldn’t fall under copyright protection,” he said.
Especially since appreciating the composition and interpretation of a musical title is particularly subjective: “If you play in front of a jury, it can go one way or another,” warns Mr. Bennett.
The work of the king of the Motown label, the African-American Marvin Gaye (1939-1984) had already been the subject of a complaint when his family – which is not a party to the Sheeran lawsuit – had won against artists Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams for similarities between the songs “Blurred Lines” and “Got To Give It Up”.
This had surprised the music industry and lawyers who consider that many melodic and harmonic elements belong to the public domain.
Getty Images via AFP
« Stairway to Heaven »
Much better known, the “Stairway to Heaven” case where the famous British hard rock band Led Zeppelin had triumphed over a Californian formation, the American justice judging in 2020 that the mythical title of 1971 was not a plagiarism.
But for Joseph Fishman, a professor of intellectual property law at Vanderbilt University, the Sheeran case risks setting a precedent.
“This can chill songwriters in their way of writing: + Will my case end up in court? +”, asks the lawyer.
Especially since in 1976, the Briton George Harrison was held responsible for having “unknowingly” plagiarized “He’s so Fine” by the group Chiffons for his solo title “My Sweet Lord.” »
In his memoirs, the former Beatles man wrote that he later suffered from “songwriting paranoia.”
This week, Ed Sheeran hinted that he could walk off the stage if he was ordered to pay damages for plagiarism.
Other composers would have told him “you have to win for us”, adding, a bit exasperated in court, that if Townsend’s heirs win he will be “done” with music.
“I find it really insulting to work all my life and have someone denigrate him saying that I stole,” he said at the helm.
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