{"id":2230,"date":"2024-08-14T00:06:19","date_gmt":"2024-08-14T00:06:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/mariah-carey-wants-all-i-want-for-christmas-lawsuit-dismissed\/"},"modified":"2024-08-14T00:06:19","modified_gmt":"2024-08-14T00:06:19","slug":"mariah-carey-wants-all-i-want-for-christmas-lawsuit-dismissed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/mariah-carey-wants-all-i-want-for-christmas-lawsuit-dismissed\/","title":{"rendered":"Mariah Carey Wants ‘All I Want for Christmas’ Lawsuit Dismissed"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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\n\tMore than nine months after Mariah Carey was again sued for allegedly stealing her perennial holiday classic \u201cAll I Want for Christmas is You\u201d from an earlier song, her attorneys have filed a motion to dismiss the lawsuit by arguing that the songs share nothing but commonplace musical building blocks.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn November, songwriter Vince Vance (real name Andy Stone) filed a second lawsuit against Carey accusing her of copyright infringement, arguing that her 1994 smash \u201cwas a greater than 50% clone\u2026in both lyric choice and chord expressions\u201d of his 1989 song of the same name, which was performed by his group Vince Vance and the Valiants (a similar lawsuit Vance filed in 2022 was subsequently dropped without prejudice, meaning he was allowed to refile). He was joined in the November action by Troy Plaintiff, who claims to have co-written the song with Vance.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in documents filed in Los Angeles federal court on Monday (Aug. 12), attorneys for Carey and her co-defendants, including \u201cAll I Want\u201d co-writer Walter Afanasieff, contend that Vance\u2019s claims fail the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeal\u2019s \u201cextrinsic test for substantial similarity in protectable expression\u201d \u2014 essentially arguing that any similarities between the two songs are coincidental.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPlaintiffs\u2019 claimed similarities between Vance and Carey are unprotectable\u2026because they are, among other things, fragmentary and commonplace building blocks of expression that Vance and Carey use differently in their overall different lyrics and music,\u201d the filing reads.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn the November lawsuit, Vance and Powers argued that the two songs share a \u201cunique linguistic structure\u201d and musical elements that Carey allegedly copied for her mega-hit, which has reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 during the holiday season for five years running. They also claimed that despite how common it is today, the phrase \u201call I want for Christmas is you\u201d was a \u201cdistinctive\u201d one back when Vance and Powers\u2019 song was released.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut Carey and her co-defendants argue that the plaintiffs \u201clack competent evidence that the songs share any protectable expression.\u201d They add that reports produced by two musicologists Vance and Powers retained to bolster their case \u201clist isolated, fragmentary similarities in Vance and Carey, while omitting differences and the context in which the claimed similarities occur,\u201d making their conclusions \u201cinherently subjective\u201d and \u201cirrelevant to the objective extrinsic test.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe claimed similarities are an unprotectable jumble of elements: a title and hook phrase used by many earlier Christmas songs, other commonplace words, phrases, and Christmas tropes like \u2018Santa Claus\u2019 and \u2018mistletoe,\u2019 and a few unprotectable pitches and chords randomly scattered throughout these completely different songs,\u201d the lawyers write.<\/p>\n

\n\tA representative for Vance and Powers did not immediately respond to Billboard<\/em>\u2019s request for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

More than nine months after Mariah Carey was again sued for allegedly stealing her perennial holiday classic \u201cAll I Want for Christmas is You\u201d from an earlier song, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":2231,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2943,2944,2059,303,2942],"class_list":["post-2230","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-carey","tag-christmas","tag-dismissed","tag-lawsuit","tag-mariah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2230"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2230\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2231"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2230"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2230"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2230"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}