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A “smoking gun” is a piece of evidence that definitively proves someone is guilty. Imagine a murder victim who has been shot to death just moments earlier. And imagine another person in the room holding a gun, with smoke billowing out of it. The smoking gun (the gun recently fired) is evidence that the person holding it is guilty.
This has evolved into a metaphor for any piece of evidence that definitively proves someone is guilty. In police shows, when the detectives finally find a piece of evidence that proves the suspect is guilty, they can say, “We found the smoking gun.” It can be a piece of DNA, phone records, or even text messages. The important thing is that it’s evidence that proves someone is guilty.
In Ed Sheeran’s civil trial for copyright infringement, the plaintiffs said they had a smoking gun that proves Ed Sheeran plagiarized the Marvin Gaye song “Let’s Get It On.” The plaintiffs played a video clip of Sheeran alternating between his own “Thinking Out Loud” and the 1973 hit “Let’s Get It On.” The two songs are similar enough that they sound in harmony when Sheeran alternated between the two on stage.
The plaintiffs thought this was proof that Sheeran’s song was a copy of Gaye’s. They said this video was the smoking gun that proves Sheeran had copied the Gaye song. But the jury did not agree that it was a smoking gun: the jury believed Sheeran’s case that many pop songs share similar building blocks and that similarities in the chord progression do not mean one artist has infringed on another’s copyright.