{"id":5065,"date":"2025-04-03T17:05:13","date_gmt":"2025-04-03T17:05:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/mariah-carey-says-christmas-accuser-must-repay-six-figure-legal-bill\/"},"modified":"2025-04-03T17:05:13","modified_gmt":"2025-04-03T17:05:13","slug":"mariah-carey-says-christmas-accuser-must-repay-six-figure-legal-bill","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/mariah-carey-says-christmas-accuser-must-repay-six-figure-legal-bill\/","title":{"rendered":"Mariah Carey Says ‘Christmas’ Accuser Must Repay Six-Figure Legal Bill"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tA<\/span>fter beating a copyright lawsuit over her holiday classic \u201cAll I Want for Christmas is You,\u201d Mariah Carey<\/a> and other defendants say the little-known songwriter who filed the case must now repay more than $180,000 they spent on lawyers defending his \u201cfrivolous\u201d arguments.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen a federal judge dismissed Vince Vance\u2019s lawsuit last month \u2013 ruling the two songs mostly just shared \u201cChristmas song clich\u00e9s\u201d \u2013 she sharply criticized the songwriter and his lawyers for \u201cegregious\u201d conduct during the case and ordered him to repay some of Carey\u2019s legal bill.<\/p>\n

\n\tOn Wednesday, that bill came due: Carey and the other defendants in the case told the judge they spent a combined $185,602.30 paying a team of high-priced lawyers to work a total of 295 hours to defeat the \u201cfrivolous\u201d motions advanced by Vance\u2019s attorneys.<\/p>\n

\n\tIf that sounds like a lot, Carey\u2019s lawyers say its because Vance was making radical demands.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe court should consider that [Vance was] seeking, among other things, $20 million in damages, injunctive relief, and even the destruction of all copies of \u2018All I Want for Christmas Is You,\u2019\u201d her attorneys say. \u201cConsidering such drastic requested relief, and the results obtained, defendants were perfectly justified in incurring the aforementioned attorney\u2019s fees to successfully oppose plaintiffs\u2019 motion.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tVance (real name Andy Stone) first sued Carey in 2022, claiming \u201cAll I Want\u201d infringed the copyrights to a 1989 song of the exact same name recorded by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. He claimed the earlier track received \u201cextensive airplay\u201d during the 1993 holiday season \u2014 a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cCarey has \u2026 palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,\u201d Vance wrote in his latest complaint. \u201cHer hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn\u2019t believe the story she has spun.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tVance\u2019s allegations were a big deal because Carey\u2019s song is big business. The 1994 blockbuster, which became even more popular after it was featured in the 2003 holiday rom-com Love Actually<\/em>, has re-taken the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and earned a whopping $8.5 million in global revenue in 2022.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a ruling last month, Judge M\u00f3nica Ram\u00edrez Almadani said Vance had failed to show that the songs were similar enough to violate copyright law. She cited analysis by a musicologist who said the two tracks were \u201cvery different songs\u201d that shared only \u201ccommonplace Christmas song clich\u00e9s\u201d that had been used in many earlier tracks.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cPlaintiffs have not met their burden of showing that [the songs by] Carey and Vance are substantially similar under the extrinsic test,\u201d Ram\u00edrez Almadani wrote at the time, using the legal term for how courts assess such allegations.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe judge not only tossed out Vance\u2019s case, but also ruled that he and his lawyers should be punished for advancing meritless arguments that the judge said were aimed to \u201ccause unnecessary delay and needlessly increase the costs of litigation.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tIn Wednesday\u2019s filing, the defendants told the judge how much Vance should pay under that order \u2013 saying they had been charged reasonable or even below-market rates from elite music litigators at top law firms.<\/p>\n

\n\tCarey, repped by Peter Anderson and others from the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, asked for about $141,000; Walter Afanasieff, a co-writer on Carey\u2019s track repped by Kenneth D. Freundlich, asked for $7,000; Sony Music, represented by Benjamin Akley, Donald Zakarin, Ilene Farkas and others from Pryor Cashman, asked for $32,000; and Kobalt, repped by Bert Deixler and others from Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP, asked for $5,000.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe judge will rule on the request at some point in the weeks or months ahead. Vance\u2019s attorneys will be allowed to file a response disputing the calculation; they can also appeal the ruling dismissing their case, though such a challenge will likely face long odds.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

After beating a copyright lawsuit over her holiday classic \u201cAll I Want for Christmas is You,\u201d Mariah Carey and other defendants say the little-known songwriter who filed the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5066,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[956,307,2943,2944,136,2942,5356,5357],"class_list":["post-5065","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-accuser","tag-bill","tag-carey","tag-christmas","tag-legal","tag-mariah","tag-repay","tag-sixfigure"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5065","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=5065"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5065\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5066"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5065"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5065"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5065"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}