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Ed Sheeran has been found not liable in a lawsuit filed against him for alleged copyright infringement over his 2014 single “Thinking Out Loud.” The verdict was reached after about three hours of deliberation by seven jurors in a New York City courtroom, per PEOPLE.
In the jury trial that went for more than a week, Ed Sheeran was accused by Structured Asset Sales of lifting direct elements of the Marvin Gaye classic “Let's Get It On” for his “Thinking Out Loud” single. Structured purchased a third of the shares of the song from the family of Ed Townsend, who co-wrote “Let's Get It On” with Gaye. His daughter Kathryn Townsend was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit. After the verdict was read, Sheeran celebrated with his lawyer and wife.
In a statement following the verdict, Sheeran wrote, “I am obviously very happy with the outcome of the case, and it looks like I'm not going to have to retire from my day job after all — but, at the same time, I am unbelievably frustrated that baseless claims like this are allowed to go to court at all.”
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Sheeran went on to say that “chords are common building blocks which were used to create music long before ‘Let's Get It On' was written and will be used to make music long after we are all gone. They are a songwriter's ‘alphabet,' our tool kit and should be there for us all to use. No-one owns them, or the way they are played, in the same way, nobody owns the color blue.”
He concluded that “by stopping this practice, we can also properly support genuine music copyright claims so that legitimate claims are rightly heard and resolved. If the Jury had decided this matter the other way, we might as well say goodbye to the creative freedom of songwriters.”
