the shape of copyright
super ultra mega commercially successful modern day busker-pop sensation (and obsessive music squirrel, if you believe the prosecution) Ed Sheeran attended a london high court for the first days of a three-week copyright theft case in which he stands accused of plagiarising grime artist Sami Chokri (aka Sami Switch) and music producer Ross O’Donoghue on Shape Of You, the most played song on Spotify, probably (Reuters Legal, 08 / 09 march).
all those streams have raked in gazillions for Sheeran and his collaborators, a great return for a song that snuck its way onto the ÷ album… except they’ve been denied the royalties since the lawsuit was scheduled for court in 2018.
Oh Why Oh Why Oh Why Oh why has this happened to poor Ed? maybe it just comes with the territory; he’s been sued before, over another of his songs. amazing.
or maybe it’s because Suffolk’s chart-topping minstrel player churns out these copyright-contentious tunes at a breathtaking rate. according to co-conspirator Johnny McDaid:
… work on (Shape Of You) was completed in ‘a couple of hours or so’, with the Snow Patrol member noting that Sheeran was ‘the fastest and most prolific songwriter I have ever worked with’.
this quasi-Fordist songwriting output may also partly explain why Sheeran is in court again. A touch of quality control is a good thing. there’s a reason why Prince had a vault. don’t open it!
not to imply he’s guilty of anything though. loads of songs sound like other songs. Sheeran confessed as much to the court:
On his second day of questioning by Chokri and O’Donoghue’s lawyer Andrew Sutcliffe, Sheeran sang the ‘Oh I’ hook and lines from songs including Nina Simone’s ‘Feeling Good’ in the same key to show how melodies can sound alike, without being copied.
none of this should surprise us. all capital ‘P’ Pop music has ever done is eat itself. the most parasitic genre to utilise conventional western harmony, Pop gorges incessantly on the capacities of every tunesmith it can until, at bursting point, it spits out the remains of their careers back into a musical swamp where a century’s worth trends in tonality, keys, modes and scales have been regurgitated to sh*t.
okay, perhaps that was a little dramatic. but parts of Sheeran’s defence as reported in the press are a little disingenuous:
Asked about the similarities between the ‘Oh Why’ and ‘Oh I’ hooks, Sheeran repeatedly told the High Court in London: ‘They’re both pentatonic scales and they both use vowels.’
i’d prefer to say beaucoup de merde sent comme les autres merdes. but that’s fine, to a degree; cultures are shaped by the environments they inhabit. it’s just that the musical swamp of 21st century Pop is colonised by copyright lawyers searching for artists’ souls to plunder in return for the tantalising prospect of scoring royalties off others.
again, dramatic. but the point is that there are plenty of litigious claims to be made, dating back decades. we know this from previous high-profile cases (Robin Thicke, Sam Smith, etc).
so, when copyright lawyers come for the music industry’s most commercially successful songwriters, you’d hope they’d have more insightful things to say about their craft than McDaid, who told the court that he found the act of plagiarism to be ‘abhorrent’, while describing how the song’s title was a phrase from his own upbringing.
McDaid said: ’The words “shape of you” came from me. It is a phrase used in Derry, where I come from.
‘I am sensitive to objectification and I was not keen on “in love with your body”, so I suggested the more abstract “shape of you”, although both appear in the song in its finished form.’
McDaid’s claim may not have been laughed out of court, but irish twitter found it amusing at least.
V. interested in the Ed Sheeran suit (’cause of the law guys! I’m sometimes v interested in the law) & ofc THRILLED this factoid has come out.
— Niamh Hargan (@EveWithAnN) March 10, 2022
What a journey, hearing “shape of you” go from a taunt in my primary school playground -> some sort of passionate, radio-friendly ode 🤣 https://t.co/uGVKajn9uj
but seriously, on a scale of paedophilia to war crimes, plagiarism is abhorrent how? taking someone’s work or (expression of an idea) from someone by definition sounds bad (and often is), but we must understand that intention is absent from that definition. if McDaid acknowledges that no artistic expression ever happens in a vacuum — it is simply the sum of all tools, talents, skills, influences and experiences a creator draws upon — then plagiarism is simply a byproduct of mining for hits in the same musical ballpark as many other artists. you will inevitably tread on someone else’s toes on the way to your jackpot. plus, given the sheer volume of content produced, it’s hard to prove anybody has even heard anything close to all of it, so coincidental similarities are entirely possible, as Sheeran implied when he sang lines from several songs in the same key to show that indeed, a lot of sh*t can sound like other sh*t how melodies can sound alike.
moreover, if we rock this argument on to the front foot, it would be fair to ask lawyers whether matters of copyright and plagiarism should be left in their care, when it produces results like this:
The court has previously been told an initial reference to the TLC song No Scrubs in Shape Of You was changed during its creation, with Sheeran explaining in his written evidence that ’because we had already gone half-way down the road of clearing the use, we ended up having to give the rights holders in No Scrubs a percentage of Shape Of You anyway’.
Sheeran’s pre-emptive act of generosity suggests that the threat of legal action weights a little too heavily on artists’ minds, which worries some quarters of the industry enough to seek machine learning solutions such as ai plagiarism detectors and algorithmically generating every single possible melody in existence, in midi, under a public domain licence. here’s hoping that the day this materialises, the rules are set fairly and sensibly. until then, as every pop songwriter is at the mercy of copyright lawyers, Sheeran and McDaid should see if they can get away with working elements of Metal Machine Music into their next tune, just for funsies.