This is an extract from Tom Seaward's weekly crime newsletter which you can sign up to for free.
Ed Sheeran’s victory over the heirs of Let’s Get it On songwriter Ed Townsend, who claimed the Suffolk man ripped off the 1973 hit when he wrote 2014 number one Thinking Out Loud, raises interesting questions about copyright.
Outside the New York court where jurors cleared him of breaching copyright, Sheeran said: "We've spent the last eight years talking about two songs with dramatically different lyrics, melodies and four chords which are also different and used by songwriters every day, all over the world.
"These chords are common building blocks which were used to create music long before Let's Get It On was written."
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The singer, who last year fought off a similar copyright action in relation to his 2017 hit Shape of You, told reporters he was frustrated that ‘baseless claims like this are allowed to go to court at all’.
"These claims and the people who manipulate songwriters for their own gain need to be stopped so that the creative process can carry on and we can all get back to making music," he said.
I’ve never covered a copyright claim relating to a song.
The closest I’ve got to singing in court was a magistrates’ court hearing when a pal of the accused was un-tunefully warbling to his mate in the dock.
But the Sheeran case had parallels with a case dealt with by Oxford judge Melissa Clarke last month.
A self-published children’s author, who had written tales about a naughty little dragon called Fred, sued John Lewis and the advertising company that came up with its 2019 Christmas ad featuring fire-sneezing Edgar.
Edgar was a young dragon who redeems his flame-based mishaps by lighting the brandy on the Christmas pudding.
Ruling against the author, Judge Clarke acknowledged there were similarities between Edgar and Fred but that they were ‘few in number and can easily be explained by coincidence rather than copying’.
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