Pop star Ed Sheeran won his copyright infringement trial in New York
Lesson summary
Hi everyone, I’m Jeff and this is Plain English lesson number 576. At Plain English, we help you upgrade your English with current events and trending topics. JR is the producer, and he has uploaded the full lesson content to PlainEnglish.com/576.
Coming up today: Ed Sheeran was on trial for copyright infringement over his hit song “Thinking of You.” The heirs to a songwriter say he copied the harmony from another song from 1973, a famous one called “Let’s Get It On.” To understand this lesson, we’re going to start with some basics in music.
You and I are going to school here, and we’re going to learn some things together in English—I don’t know anything about music theory, so this is a learning experience for me too. But we’ll get through it together. Now last Thursday when I was teasing this episode, I said he was on trial in London; that’s not right, it was New York. Just wanted to make that clear before we get started—and no, that wasn’t a ChatGPT error , that was me, all my fault.
Speaking of ChatGPT, remember that we’re kicking off our Plain English ChatGPT Challenge next Monday, June 5, so you’ll want to sign up at PlainEnglish.com/GPT.
Oh, the expression. In the second half of the lesson, I’ll show you how to use the expression “building blocks.” And we have a quote of the week. Let’s get going.
Ed Sheeran prevails in music copyright trial
A single musical sound is called a note. If you strike a single key on a piano, you produce a note. Often in music, three or more notes go together. When three or more notes go together, they form a chord, c-h-o-r-d. So if you go to a piano and, with three fingers, you strike three piano keys at once, you have produced a chord.
You can also produce a chord if you strike the three keys sequentially—one right after another. And if you have a guitar, you can strum the six strings to produce six notes, one right after another, to form a chord that way.
So we’ve got a note, which is a single sound; we’ve got a chord, which is a grouping of notes that go together, either simultaneously or in a sequence. Now, you’re ready for a chord progression. A chord progression is a sequence of chords that are played in specific order. Think of it as a complicated, repeating pattern of notes. And it’s the chord progression that forms the basis of a song or a piece of music.
That brings us to Ed Sheeran. He’s a British pop star with a mop of red hair. He began writing songs when he was eleven; by age twenty, he had released his first album. He’s one of the world’s best-selling musical pop stars; in 2022, he was Spotify’s most-followed artist.
He has a song called “Thinking Out Loud.” If you listen to pop music, you’ve probably heard it. If you listen carefully, you’ll notice similarities between “Thinking Out Loud” and another famous pop song, “Let’s Get It On” from 1973. That song is by Marvin Gaye; it was co-written by someone named Ed Townsend. Marvin Gaye died forty years ago; Ed Townsend died twenty years ago.
But Ed Townsend’s heirs own the rights to his intellectual property. And they listened to Ed Sheeran’s song, “Thinking Out Loud” and they accused Sheeran of copying their dad’s work. They sued him in court in New York.
The case centered around chord progression. A single musical chord can’t be copyrighted; just like you can’t copyright a letter in the alphabet, or a word in the language, you can’t copyright sound. But the plaintiffs—Ed Townsend’s family—they argued that the selection and arrangement of the chords in “Let’s Get It On” were distinctive enough to be his intellectual property.
Think of it this way. I can’t copyright the letter “P.” I can’t copyright the word “Plain.” I can’t even copyright the term “Plain English.” But I did create this lesson; it’s about 2,000 words and I do hold the copyright to this lesson, the selection and arrangement of those 2,000 words.
So the question is, how does this principle apply in music? The defense—Ed Sheeran—said that there’s just a limited number of musical notes and chords in existence. And if you listen hard enough, he argued, you’ll notice that pop music songs often recycle chords and chord progressions from one another. So, he argued, you can’t say that a song can copyright a combination of chords; there are just not enough of them in existence.
He admitted that the chord progressions in his song and Marvin Gaye’s song are similar, but he pointed out that they are not identical. He took out his guitar on the witness stand in the trial and played chord progressions of “Let It Be” by the Beatles and “No Woman, No Cry” by Bob Marley, and highlighted the similarities in chord progressions in those two songs. His point was, even the greats borrow from one another, that many popular and successful songs use similar chord progressions to one another.
A musicologist who testified for the defense pointed to two other songs that shared the same chord progressions as “Let’s Get It On,” both of which came out before the Marvin Gaye classic. They also submitted a guitar textbook, which cited this same chord progression as a standard building block of songs.
The plaintiffs had some good arguments, too. They played a video of Ed Sheeran in concert. In the video, Sheeran himself alternates between his song—”Thinking Out Loud”—and Marvin Gaye’s song—”Let’s Get It On.” That, the plaintiffs said, was the smoking gun : the songs are so similar, that Ed Sheeran himself on stage switched back and forth between them; they sounded like they could be just one song. Proof, the plaintiffs said, that Sheeran had copied the Marvin Gaye song.
The jury didn’t buy it . They deliberated for three hours and concluded that “Thinking Out Loud” was Ed Sheeran’s original work. They found that Ed Sheeran did not copy the Marvin Gaye song.
The music industry breathed a sigh of relief . The industry worried that there would be a new culture of copyright infringement lawsuits over musical notes—and they worried that the threat of being sued would stifle creativity in the industry. This will probably not be the last high-profile case of this nature, but this was a big win for Sheeran.
For his part, he said: “I am just a guy with a guitar who loves writing music for people to enjoy.” He said: “I am not and will never allow myself to be a piggy bank for anyone to shake.”
Sign up for the ChatGPT Challenge
We’re almost there—seven more days until the Plain English ChatGPT challenge starts. That’s happening on June 5, one week from today. You are not going to want to miss this. It’s really good; it’s a lot of fun.
We had a live call a few weeks ago. This is part of Plain English Plus. And our activity for the call was to have some fun with ChatGPT. Every call, we have a discussion topic or an activity that we do together in English. And this was one of my favorite live calls. We had a lot of people on, and everyone had fun. A bunch of members—including JR—had never been on ChatGPT before, but they signed up during the call and experimented.
So that call with Plain English Plus members was my inspiration for the challenge. And I know this is going to be fun because we had so much fun on that small group call. And it was so much fun that I wanted to find a way to bring that experience to all of you, to everyone in the audience.
PlainEnglish.com/GPT is where you sign up. Go ahead and do that now so you don’t forget!
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