Justin Bieber and Dan + Shay accused of ripping off 80s song

completemusicupdate.com:

When country pop duo Dan + Shay teamed up with Justin Bieber in 2019 to release their hit ‘10,000 Hours’, they marked the occasion by ripping off the 1980s soul song ‘The First Time Baby Is A Holiday’.

Or so says the company that owns the copyright in the 1980s soul song ‘The First Time Baby Is a Holiday’. In fact, it reckons, the musical “theft” committed by Dan, Shay and Bieber is “impudently bold”.So, yes, this is yet another song-theft lawsuit, this time filed with the courts in California.

The company suing is called Melomega Music, a business originally set up in the 1970s by songwriter Frank Fioravanti, who co-wrote ‘The First Time Baby Is a Holiday’ with Palmer Rakes in 1980.Despite the big ‘Blurred Lines’ ruling in 2015, in which it was concluded that Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had infringed the copyright in Marvin Gaye’s ‘Got To Give It Up’ when writing their hit, in more recent song-theft cases of this kind the courts have generally been cautious about ruling that where two songs have similar elements, the newer one must have infringed rights in the older one.

And that is especially so in the Californian courts that sit under the Ninth Circuit appeals court.However, in its lawsuit Melomega is keen to stress the significant and extensive similarities between ‘10,000 Hours’ and ‘First Time Baby’ which, it says, are incredibly unlikely to have occurred by coincidence.