Mariah Carey has been cleared in the lawsuit over her 1994 festive classic ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
The country singer Andy Stone – who performs under the stage name Vince Vance – first filed a suit against Carey in a Los Angeles federal court in November 2023. He alleged that Carey’s song infringed the copyright of his 1989 song of the same name and that the pop singer had exploited his “popularity” and “style”.
“If you look at both songs, you can see that about 50 per cent of the words are the same, in almost the same order. I think it’s a pretty strong claim,” the plaintiff’s lawyer, Douglas M. Schmidt, previously said.
Now, Judge Monica Ramirez Almadini has ruled that Stone’s lawyers had not “met their burden of showing” that the two songs were “substantially similar”. Stone had been seeking at least $20million (£16million) in damages.
Instead, Almadini referred to expert testimony that testified that rather than breaching copyright laws, the two songs simply shared “Christmas song cliches” that had been present in several earlier songs (via BBC).
The judge added that Stone and his lawyers should now face sanctions for filing “frivolous” arguments, including “vague…and incomprehensible mixtures of factual assertions and conclusions, subjective opinions and other irrelevant evidence”. They have also been instructed to pay Carey’s legal bills for the case.
In November, Almadini had said she was “inclined” to throw the case out, after Carey’s team had requested it be dropped as the claims failed the court’s “extrinsic test for substantial similarity in protectable expression”.
Back in 2020, Carey’s ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ became a UK Number One for the first time ever, 26 years after it was first released.
This summer, Carey will play a huge show at the Royal Sandringham Estate in Norfolk alongside Eternal and Nile Rodgers & Chic. It goes down on August 15, and you can find any remaining tickets here.
The hitmaker has also been announced as one of the artists nominated for the Class Of 2025 Hall Of Fame – joining Cyndi Lauper, The White Stripes, Billy Idol, Joe Cocker, Oasis, New Order, Soundgarden, OutKast and more.
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