Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE (born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project. After signing with Asylum Records, his debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011. It topped the UK and Australian charts, reached number five in the US, and has since been certified eight-times platinum in the UK.
The album contains the single "The A Team", which earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, where he performed the song with Elton John.
Ed Sheeran testifies in Shape Of You song-theft dispute
completemusicupdate.comEd Sheeran said in the high court yesterday that – while he is influenced by other songs when writing his own music – he is not a “magpie” that routinely lifts elements of those existing songs without permission.
And where one of his songs does arguably share a musical element with an existing work, he goes out of his way to clear and credit the original.Meanwhile, he settled an earlier song-theft lawsuit over his song ‘Photograph’ out of court not because he thought he was liable for copyright infringement, but because he was advised it was the easiest way to move beyond that particular dispute.All of this was said as the musician gave testimony as part of the song-theft legal battle in the UK courts over his song ‘Shape Of You’.
He and is collaborators are accused of ripping off the earlier track ‘Oh Why’ by Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue when they wrote their 2017 hit.It was the lawyer repping Chokri and O’Donoghue – Andrew Sutcliffe – who dubbed Sheeran a musical “magpie” as this case got underway on Friday. “Ed Sheeran is undeniably very talented”, he said. “He is a genius.
But he is also a magpie. He borrows ideas and throws them into his songs”.The legal man then argued that whenever Sheeran borrows from famous songs by famous writers he cuts a deal with the people behind the earlier work, noting that such a deal was done in relation to ‘Shape Of You’ with the writers of TLC’s 1999 hit ‘No Scrubs’.
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