Ed Sheeran’s legal battle over Shape of You ‘deeply traumatising’, court hears

metro.co.uk:

Ed Sheeran’s song Shape Of You has been ‘deeply traumatising’ for the singer and his co-writers, the High Court has been told.Grime artist and songwriter Sami Chokri, who performs under the name Sami Switch, claimed that the hit, released in 2017, infringes ‘particular lines and phrases’ of his 2015 song, Oh Why.He and his co-writer Ross O’Donoghue have argued that a central ‘Oh I’ hook in Shape of You is ‘strikingly similar’ to the ‘Oh Why’ refrain in their own track.The Thinking Out Loud musician and his co-authors, producer Steven McCutcheon and Snow Patrol’s John McDaid, have denied all allegations of copying, claiming that they do not remember hearing Oh Why before the claims came to light.Their barrister, Ian Mill QC, has now described the High Court dispute as ‘terribly, terribly unfortunate’ at a hearing in London, on Monday, and said that the case is ‘impossible to hold’.‘This case should never have got to trial,’ he told the court in his closing arguments on Monday, via PA. ‘My clients are entitled to be vindicated.’He said that in order to support the claims put forward by Sami and Ross, ‘an awful lot of people’ would have told ‘untruths’ during the trial.In his written arguments, Mr Mill claimed that their case that Oh Why was allegedly consciously copied was ‘so strained as to be logically unintelligible’.‘The contemporaneous documents and evidence overwhelmingly support a case of independent creation,’ the court heard.‘There is no credible basis upon which to suggest that Mr Sheeran had ever heard Oh Why in advance of writing Shape Of You.’As well as this, Mr Mill also rejected the suggestion that Ed and Sami had ‘overlapping circles’ of artists, writers and producers in common, stating that there had been.