Disney sued over alleged song theft on Frozen II soundtrack

completemusicupdate.com:

An artist and songwriter has sued Disney claiming that a song which appeared on the soundtrack to 2019’s ‘Frozen II’ movie ripped off a track he wrote and released via his own label Pelican Records all the way back in 1999.The alleged rip off song is ‘Some Things Never Change’.

According to Daniel E Grigson, it is basically a rework of his song ‘That Girl’. Indeed, his lawsuit claims, the similarities between his song and the ‘Frozen II’ song “are so striking that they can only be explained by copying”.Grigson’s legal filing provides the background to the release of ‘That Girl’ in 1999 and also talks through his wider work writing music for and with children.

That includes various releases via his Pelican Records label plus some projects that had a presence on YouTube and social media.‘Some Things Never Change’ was written by husband-and-wife songwriting team Robert Lopez and Kristen Anderson-Lopez.

The chances of them, and especially Robert, having heard Grigson’s output is high, the lawsuit reckons, because he has “publicly admitted he always loves to listen to other songs that could be useful to draw inspiration from and loves watching any kind of YouTube”.A big chunk of the lawsuit analyses the allegedly similarities between the two songs, partly based on Grigson’s own analysis, but also based on the work of one of those expert musicologists, Robert Tomaro.