More than nine months after Mariah Carey was again sued for allegedly stealing her perennial holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas is You” from an earlier song, her attorneys have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing that the songs share nothing but commonplace musical building blocks.
In November, songwriter Vince Vance (real name Andy Stone) filed a second lawsuit against Carey accusing her of copyright infringement, arguing that her 1994 smash “was a greater than 50% clone…in both lyric choice and chord expressions” of his 1989 song of the same name, which was performed by his group Vince Vance and the Valiants (a similar lawsuit Vance filed in 2022 was subsequently dropped without prejudice, meaning he was allowed to refile). He was joined in the November action by Troy Plaintiff, who claims to have co-written the song with Vance.
But in documents filed in Los Angeles federal court on Monday (Aug. 12), attorneys for Carey and her co-defendants, including “All I Want” co-writer Walter Afanasieff, contend that Vance’s claims fail the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal’s “extrinsic test for substantial similarity in protectable expression” — essentially arguing that any similarities between the two songs are coincidental.
“Plaintiffs’ claimed similarities between Vance and Carey are unprotectable…because they are, among other things, fragmentary and commonplace building blocks of expression that Vance and Carey use differently in their overall different lyrics and music,” the filing reads.
In the November lawsuit, Vance and Powers argued that the two songs share a “unique linguistic structure” and musical elements that Carey allegedly copied for her mega-hit, which has reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the holiday season for five years running. They also claimed that despite how common it is today, the phrase “all I want for Christmas is you” was a “distinctive” one back when Vance and Powers’ song was released.
But Carey and her co-defendants argue that the plaintiffs “lack competent evidence that the songs share any protectable expression.” They add that reports produced by two musicologists Vance and Powers retained to bolster their case “list isolated, fragmentary similarities in Vance and Carey, while omitting differences and the context in which the claimed similarities occur,” making their conclusions “inherently subjective” and “irrelevant to the objective extrinsic test.”
“The claimed similarities are an unprotectable jumble of elements: a title and hook phrase used by many earlier Christmas songs, other commonplace words, phrases, and Christmas tropes like ‘Santa Claus’ and ‘mistletoe,’ and a few unprotectable pitches and chords randomly scattered throughout these completely different songs,” the lawyers write.
A representative for Vance and Powers did not immediately respond to Billboard’s request for comment.