In a Q&A with Harvard Law Today, Partner Louis Tompros delved into the copyright infringement lawsuit filed by producer Ed Townsend’s estate involving Ed Sheeran’s chart-topping ballad, “Thinking Out Loud.”
During the Q&A Tompros, an experienced first-chair trial and appellate litigator, discussed legal standards, comparable cases and the industry-wide impact of an estate win.
Excerpt: The fundamental question for any copyright infringement is, ‘was this a copy or not?’ Here, the question is, was “Thinking Out Loud” a copy of “Let’s Get It On”? The standard for that takes into account two things — similarity and access. So specifically, the jury’s question is, were the accessible and protectable elements of the Gaye song similar or not similar?
Now, there’s a weird issue in this Ed Sheeran/Marvin Gaye dispute that has come up before in music cases, and it has to do with the way that the Copyright Act changed in the 1970s. It turns out that for most songs written before 1978, the only thing that you could deposit with the Copyright Office, and therefore the only thing that you could protect, was the sheet music for a song. And of course, the sheet music may or may not encompass all of the aspects of the performance of the song. So here, as a purely technical matter, what Townsend’s estate has rights to is the music embodied in the deposit copy of the sheet music — in this case, it’s just chords and lyrics, there is no bassline. So, the bassline can’t be part of the consideration.
Tompros also discusses the topic in a TikTok video for Harvard.
@harvard Harvard Law School’s Louis Tompros explains how the jury might have determined the verdict in the Ed Sheeran music copyright case. #EdSheeran #harvard #HarvardUniversity #Music #Copyright #edutok #FYP #law #lawtok #news #headlines #ViralNews #MarvinGaye #CopyrightInfringement #Trial #verdict #HarvardLaw ♬ Originalton - Chaël