Ed Sheeran wants the U.S. Supreme Court to finally end one of the long-running lawsuits claiming his “Thinking Out Loud” infringed Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On,” calling a recent appeal to the high court “baseless.”
The star’s accuser — a company that owns a partial stake in Gaye’s 1973 song — asked the justices earlier this year to revive the case, which was dismissed in November after a lower court ruled that the two tracks share only basic “musical building blocks.”
In a response Friday (May 16), Sheeran’s attorneys said the “Thinking” case is not the kind of precedent-setting case that’s worth the Supreme Court’s time — but that the accusers are using a “false premise” and “baseless assertions” as it “pretends” that it is.
“The question which petitioner purports to present is not actually presented by this case but has been fabricated in effort to attract this court’s attention,” Sheeran’s lawyers wr0te. “The petition should be denied.”
Sheeran has faced multiple lawsuits over “Thinking,” a 2014 track co-written with Amy Wadge that reached No. 2 on the Billboard Hot 100 and ultimately spent 58 weeks on the chart.
He was first sued by the daughter of Ed Townsend, who co-wrote the famed 1973 tune with Gaye. That case ended in a high-profile jury verdict that cleared Sheeran of any wrongdoing.
Thursday’s petition came in a separate case filed by a company called Structured Asset Sales (SAS), an entity owned by industry executive David Pullman that controls a different stake in Townsend’s copyrights to the legendary song. That suit was rejected in November by the federal Second Circuit appeals court, which said the lawsuit was essentially seeking “a monopoly over a combination of two fundamental musical building blocks.”
“The four-chord progression at issue — ubiquitous in pop music — even coupled with a syncopated harmonic rhythm, is too well-explored to meet the originality threshold that copyright law demands,” the appeals court wrote. “Overprotecting such basic elements would threaten to stifle creativity and undermine the purpose of copyright law.”
In a petition to the Supreme Court in March, SAS argued that the appeals court’s ruling had unfairly restricted its allegations to written sheet music rather than all elements included in Gaye’s iconic recorded version. That thorny issue, which has also cropped up in other major cases over “Blurred Lines” and “Stairway To Heaven” in recent years, must finally be resolved by the high court, the company said at the time.
“The rights of thousands of legacy musical composers and artists, of many of the most beloved and enduring pieces of popular music, are at the center of the controversy,” SAS’s lawyers wrote.
In Friday’s response, Sheeran’s lawyers said the stakes of the case had been vastly overstated — that the case law was clearly settled, that there was no controversy among the lower courts, and that it was SAS that was threatening to upend the law: “The self-serving free-for-all petitioner posits would foment vast uncertainty and encourage rampant speculation, decades after the fact.”
Appeals to the Supreme Court, known as petitions for writ of certiorari, face extremely long odds. The court takes less than 2% of the roughly 7,000 cases it receives each year, hearing only the disputes it deems most important to the national legal landscape.
