A legal row over the copyright of Ed Sheeran’s song Shape Of You has been ‘deeply traumatising’ for the singer and his co-writers, the High Court has been told.
Grime artist and songwriter Sami Chokri, who performs under the name Sami Switch, claimed that the hit, released in 2017, infringes ‘particular lines and phrases’ of his 2015 song, Oh Why.
He and his co-writer Ross O’Donoghue have argued that a central ‘Oh I’ hook in Shape of You is ‘strikingly similar’ to the ‘Oh Why’ refrain in their own track.
The Thinking Out Loud musician and his co-authors, producer Steven McCutcheon and Snow Patrol’s John McDaid, have denied all allegations of copying, claiming that they do not remember hearing Oh Why before the claims came to light.
Their barrister, Ian Mill QC, has now described the High Court dispute as ‘terribly, terribly unfortunate’ at a hearing in London, on Monday, and said that the case is ‘impossible to hold’.
‘This case should never have got to trial,’ he told the court in his closing arguments on Monday, via PA. ‘My clients are entitled to be vindicated.’
He said that in order to support the claims put forward by Sami and Ross, ‘an awful lot of people’ would have told ‘untruths’ during the trial.
In his written arguments, Mr Mill claimed that their case that Oh Why was allegedly consciously copied was ‘so strained as to be logically unintelligible’.
‘The contemporaneous documents and evidence overwhelmingly support a case of independent creation,’ the court heard.
‘There is no credible basis upon which to suggest that Mr Sheeran had ever heard Oh Why in advance of writing Shape Of You.’
As well as this, Mr Mill also rejected the suggestion that Ed and Sami had ‘overlapping circles’ of artists, writers and producers in common, stating that there had been a ‘concerted plan’ to bring Oh Why to the award-winner’s attention.
He said the case ‘amounts to a series of tenuous connections and bare assertions contradicted by the contemporaneous documents and the unequivocal evidence of a significant number of relevant witnesses’.
‘They comprise, in substance, the use of the first four notes of the minor pentatonic scale combined with the use of octaves and harmonies in a vocal chant,’ he added.
‘Qualitatively assessed, these elements cannot be characterised as the elements which conferred originality on Oh Why as a musical work.’
Andrew Sutcliffe QC, for Sami and Ross, is due to begin his closing arguments on Tuesday.
Ed and his Shape of You co-writers launched legal proceedings in May, 2018, asking the High Court to declare they had not infringed the copyright.
In July of the same year, Sami and Ross issued their own claim for ‘copyright infringement, damages and an account of profits in relation to the alleged infringement’.
The trial is expected to conclude on Tuesday, with Mr Justice Zacaroli’s judgment coming at a later date.
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