An unreleased Ed Sheeran song was accidentally played during the Shape of You copyright hearing, with the singer asking to know how it was accessed.
The singer-songwriter, 31, is fighting a copyright claim against his monster hit, which two songwriters claim rips off parts of their track.
Writers Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue allege that the 2017 hit infringes ‘particular lines and phrases’ of their own song Oh Why, released in 2015.
Sheeran has denied the claim.
At one point, a clip of an unreleased song of Ed’s was mistakenly played in the High Court.
The singer looked confused when a short blast of music was heard in the hearing on Tuesday as he faced questions over how the 2017 song was created.
Glancing at his lawyers, Sheeran said: ‘That’s a song I wrote last January. How have you got that?’
Ian Mill QC, Sheeran’s barrister, told the court that Sheeran was left ‘disconcerted’ by the music being played while he was asked to listen to early recordings from the creation of Shape Of You.
Mr Mill explained that the incident happened “by mistake” through the use of his co-writer Steven McCutcheon’s computer and his iTunes which ‘contains some unreleased material.’
He said there had been an apology, adding: ‘I’m sure it won’t happen again’
The BBC also reports that Sheeran sang parts of Nina Simone’s Feeling Good and Blackstreet’s No Diggity to demonstrate how the melody is commonplace in pop music.
He said: ‘If you put them all in the same key, they’ll sound the same.’
Sheeran and his Shape of You co-writers, Steven McCutcheon and Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid, began legal proceedings in May 2018, asking the High Court to declare they had not infringed Chokri and O’Donoghue’s copyright.
Two months later, Chokri and O’Donoghue issued their own claim for ‘copyright infringement, damages and an account of profits in relation to the alleged infringement.’
The trial began on Friday and is expected to last for three weeks. On Tuesday, Sheeran was seen heading back into the courthouse in a black suit and tie.
On Friday, Andrew Sutcliffe QC, for Chokri and O’Donoghue, said Sheeran ‘borrows ideas and throws them into his songs, sometimes he will acknowledge it but sometimes he won’t.’
The barrister alleged the acknowledgement depended on how famous the other artist was, adding the two songwriters ‘are not Shaggy, Coldplay, Rihanna or Jay-Z, if they were they would have been treated in a very different way.’
At the start of his evidence on Monday, Ian Mill QC, for Sheeran, asked: ‘Do you accept that you behave or have behaved in that way?’
Sheeran said ‘no,’ before adding: ‘The examples he has been using are obviously famous artists, two of them are people I’ve made songs with.’
The artist continued that ‘if Mr Sutcliffe would have done his research,’ he would have known there were ‘lots’ of unknown artists he had cleared parts of songs with.
Refuting the allegation, Mr Sheeran gave several examples of when he had cleared aspects of songs with unknown artists, including sampling a part of a song from the TV show Buffy the Vampire Slayer from an ‘unknown composer.’
‘All those examples are not famous artists that we’ve cleared songs with and that’s what I have to say on that,’ he said.
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