A federal judge in Los Angeles has ruled that Mariah Carey Did not rob his perennial megahit “Everything I want for Christmas is you” Of other composers.
Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani granted Carey the request for summary trial on Wednesday, giving her and the co -co -counted and coacusado Walter Afanasieff a victory without going to trial.
In 2023, Louisiana Andy Stone composers, which is known as the artistic name Vince Vance, and Troy Powers of Tennessee filed the demand of $ 20 million claiming that Carey’s song in 1994, which has since become a sensation of standard and annual annual transmission, violated the copyright of his 1989 song with the same title.
His lawyer Gerard P. Fox said he is “disappointed” in an email to Associated Press.
Fox said it is his experience that judges at this level “almost always dismiss a case of music rights and that one must appeal to reverse and take the case to the jury. My client will make a decision shortly about whether to appeal. We present based on the opinions of two estimated musicologists who teach in great universities.”
The Stone and Powers suit said that your “‘Everything I want for Christmas is’ contains a unique linguistic structure where a person, disappointed with expensive gifts and seasonal comforts, wants to be with your loved one and, consequently, write a letter to Santa Claus.”
They said that there was an “overwhelming probability” that Carey and Afanasieff had heard their song, which at one time reached number 31 on the Billboard Hot Country list, and infringed their copyright taking significant elements of it.
After listening to two experts for each side, Ramírez Almadani agreed with those of the defense, who said that the writers used common Christmas clichés that existed before both songs, and that Carey song used them differently. She said the plaintiffs had not found the burden of demonstrating that the songs are substantially similar.
Ramírez Almadani also ordered sanctions against the plaintiffs and their lawyers, saying that their demand and their subsequent presentations were frivolous and that the lawyers of the plaintiffs “did not make any reasonable effort to ensure that the factual statements affirmed have probative support.”
She said they must pay at least part of the defendant’s lawyers.
Carey’s defense and publicist lawyers did not immediately respond to a request for comments.
The Carey Christmas colossus has become an even greater success in recent years than in the 1990s. It has reached number 1 in the Billboard Hot 100 list in the last six years in a row, measuring the most popular songs every week, not only the holidays, by plane, sales and transmission.
Carey and Afanasieff have had their own public disagreement – Although he has not gone to court, who wrote how much of the song. But the case made them at least temporary allies.
