{"id":5430,"date":"2025-04-23T17:12:03","date_gmt":"2025-04-23T17:12:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/christmas-accuser-rips-legal-bill-demand\/"},"modified":"2025-04-23T17:12:03","modified_gmt":"2025-04-23T17:12:03","slug":"christmas-accuser-rips-legal-bill-demand","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/christmas-accuser-rips-legal-bill-demand\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Christmas\u2019 Accuser Rips Legal Bill Demand"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tA<\/span> songwriter who unsuccessfully sued Mariah Carey<\/a> over \u201cAll I Want for Christmas is You\u201d is pleading with a judge to reject demands that he repay her six-figure legal bill, warning it would push an \u201celderly man\u201d to \u201cthe brink of a financial collapse.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter beating Vince Vance<\/strong>\u2019s copyright lawsuit over her holiday classic, Carey, Sony Music and other defendants told the judge earlier this month that they had paid nearly $186,000 to a team of lawyers to defeat \u201cfrivolous\u201d motions advanced by Vance\u2019s attorneys.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a response filing on Monday, Vance\u2019s lawyers said that such a award was \u201csimply not reasonable\u201d and completely out of proportion for the amount of litigation at issue \u2013 and that it could bankrupt an an \u201celderly man now without vast resources.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe plaintiff is elder and living off his music catalog and some touring,\u201d the songwriter\u2019s attorneys say. \u201cOne artist should not push another artist to the brink of a financial collapse.\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 by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. He said his track had received \u201cextensive airplay\u201d during the 1993 holiday season \u2014 a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe case was a big deal because Carey\u2019s song is big business. The 1994 hit, which became even more popular after it appeared 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 revenue in 2022.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut in a ruling last month, Judge M\u00f3nica Ram\u00edrez Almadani <\/strong>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\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\tEarlier this month, Carey and the other defendants told the judge they had paid a combined $185,602.30 for a total of 295 hours to defeat those motions. They said they spent a lot because Vance was demanding \u201cdrastic\u201d thing, like $20 million in damages and the \u201cdestruction\u201d of all copies of Carey\u2019s song.<\/p>\n

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

\n\tBut in Tuesday\u2019s response, Vance\u2019s lawyer (Gerard P. Fox<\/strong>) said those demands were far too high for a case that he said had been filed with good intentions and sound legal reasoning.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cHe heard something that to him seemed substantially similar and spent money that is sparse for him on two of the top musicologists in the country and asked them for their independent opinions, and they both gave him the same opinion: there was infringement,\u201d Fox writes.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThe loss of this case \u2026 is staggering enough for this plaintiff and saddling him with $185,000 of big law firm billing that is unreasonable and forcing him to sell parts of his catalogue of music will accomplish nothing,\u201d the lawyer writes.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A songwriter who unsuccessfully sued Mariah Carey over \u201cAll I Want for Christmas is You\u201d is pleading with a judge to reject demands that he repay her six-figure […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5431,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[956,307,2944,400,136,5622],"class_list":["post-5430","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-accuser","tag-bill","tag-christmas","tag-demand","tag-legal","tag-rips"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5430","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=5430"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5430\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5431"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5430"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5430"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5430"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}