A jury has found Ed Sheeran not liable in a lawsuit filed against him for alleged copyright infringement over his 2014 single “Thinking Out Loud.”
The unanimous verdict was reached after about three hours of deliberation by seven jurors in a New York City courtroom Thursday.
“I feel like the truth was heard and the truth was believed,” Sheeran, 32, told PEOPLE exclusively in the courthouse following the decision. “It’s nice that we can both move on with our lives now — it’s sad that it had to come to this.”
After the verdict was read, the musician hugged his legal team and co-writer Amy Wadge, then approached plaintiff Kathryn Townsend Griffin and the two smiled and talked before exchanging hugs. As he exited the courtroom, Sheeran embraced and kissed wife Cherry Seaborn, who was in attendance.
In a jury trial that went for more than a week, 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 the iconic Gaye, in 2018. His daughter Kathryn Townsend Griffin was one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit.
In a statement Sheeran read aloud outside the courthouse and distributed to reporters following the verdict, he wrote, “Good afternoon. 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.
We have spent the last eight years talking about two songs with dramatically different lyrics, melodies and four chords which are also different and used by songwriters every day, all over the world.
These 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 colour blue.
Unfortunately, unfounded claims like this one are being fuelled by individuals who are offered as experts in musical analysis. In this instance, the other side’s musicologist left out words and notes, presented simple (and different) pitches as melody, creating misleading comparisons and disinformation to find supposed similarities where none exist.
