There’s a good chance you’ve heard a song by Ed Sheeran called ‘Shape of You’. It’s been streamed over three billion times on Spotify and viewed over five billion times on YouTube.
The song ‘Oh Why’, by Sam Chokri, is less well known. But Chokri claimed that Sheeran had copied it when composing his hugely successful track.
That long-running claim has now been dismissed after a judge decided that, while the two songs are similar, Sheeran had “neither deliberately nor subconsciously copied” Chokri’s composition. The verdict was no doubt a relief for Sheeran and should be celebrated by anyone who values creativity.
It was also a good chance for the music industry, which has changed so much in recent years, to get a clear sense of what is (and what isn’t) protected by a law that is often misunderstood.
Put simply then, the test for copyright infringement has two parts. The first (in a music case) is about whether the alleged infringer has heard the piece of music they are accused of copying. After all, you can’t copy something you haven’t heard. But it’s very hard to present actual evidence that someone has heard a song before, so the legal standard is set quite low.
“3.8 million views on YouTube were considered enough to assume that the singer Katy Perry had heard a song”
In fact, this test has been overcome in other situations, such as a case in the US where 3.8 million views on YouTube were considered enough to assume that the singer Katy Perry had heard a song.
In the Sheeran case, Chokri’s side argued in court that Sheeran copied the work of other songwriters. Chokri’s lawyer said: “Mr Sheeran is undoubtedly very talented, he is a genius. But he is also a magpie. He borrows ideas and throws them into his songs, sometimes he will acknowledge it, but sometimes he won’t.”
