Ed Sheeran could be facing yet another legal issue in the Marvin Gaye “Thinking Out Loud”/”Let’s Get It On” copyright case just months after he was handed the victory.
According to Billboard, David Pullman’s Structured Asset Sales filed an appeal for the court to reverse its decision and restore the case so that it can go to trial. The different plaintiffs, who own a one-third stake in Ed Townsend’s (the co-writer of Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On”) copyrights, previously filed a similar case that was tossed out shortly after Sheeran’s May victory as a federal judge ruled that the company was looking for “impermissible monopoly over a basic musical building block.”
Lawyers for Structured Asset Sales stated in their opening brief that Judge Louis Stanton supposedly committed errors in the case’s dismissal in May. They highlighted that the judge did not allow them to cite the song’s recorded version in their case and that Judge Stanton ruled that the company only owned the rights to a “deposit copy,” which is the basic notation that was filed at the Copyright Office in order to get a copyright registration. That error allegedly “severely” affected Structured Asset Sales’ chances to win their case. “Musical notation is a way of trying to capture the ephemeral in the physical, but it is and has always been limited in its ability to capture every nuance of the work,” the company’s attorneys wrote. “Deposit copies do not, and were never meant to be, a limitation on the scope of the copyright they represent.” Lawyers also questioned the timing of the judge’s ruling as it took place weeks after the case was dismissed in May and called Judge Stanton’s logic “a mystery.”
Meanwhile, the case from May seems to have officially come to an end as the lawyers of Kathryn Griffin Townsend, the daughter of Ed Townsend, dropped their efforts to overturn the victory handed to Sheeran. Her original case took years and claimed that Sheeran copied “Let’s Get It On” for his hit song “Thinking Out Loud.” The highly-publicized case was so contentious that Sheeran even announced that he will be “done” with music if he lost the trial.
Elsewhere in music, Lauryn Hill added new dates to The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill 25th anniversary tour.
