Shape Of You song-theft court case concludes

completemusicupdate.com:

The ‘Shape Of You’ song-theft court case has now concluded with judge Antony Zacaroli busy considering whether or not Ed Sheeran is indeed a musical magpie and squirrel, who likes lifting elements of other people’s songs when making his music.

Or, at least, who lifted a key line from the 2015 track ‘Oh Why’ when he wrote his 2017 hit ‘Shape Of You’.Sami Chokri reckons that Sheeran got a copy of his track ‘Oh Why’ through mutual friends or industry connections and then, when the star and his songwriting pals got together in late 2016 to write ‘Shape Of You’, he either consciously or subconsciously utilised a key element of the earlier song within his hit.But Sheeran and his collaborators deny having ever heard ‘Oh Why’ before writing ‘Shape Of You’.

Meanwhile, they argue, the elements that are shared by the two songs are pretty commonplace in pop music, which means it’s not entirely unlikely that two separate songwriters would separately write songs that sound similar in that way.This week legal reps for the two sides – Ian Mill for Sheeran et al and Andrew Sutcliffe for Chokri – delivered their closing arguments, honing in on the two key aspects of any song-theft case.

First, are ‘Oh Why’ and ‘Shape Of You’ sufficiently similar to suggest copying and constitute copyright infringement? And second, did Sheeran hear ‘Oh Why’ before writing his song?For Sutcliffe, of course, the answer to both those questions is “fuck yeah!”, to use the legal term.