A judge ruled this morning that the copyright infringement suit brought against Mariah Carey’s perennial classic “All I Want For Christmas Is You” was without merit. In 2022, songwriter Vince Vance alleged that Carey stole the title of his 1989 Christmas hit, also called “All I Want For Christmas Is You.” But that’s about where the similarities end, Carey’s team countered, and Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani agreed, Billboard reports this morning.
Citing analysis from an expert musicologist, Almadani rules that the similarities between the “very different songs” are merely “commonplace Christmas song clichés.” “Plaintiffs have not met their burden of showing that [the songs by] Carey and Vance are substantially similar under the extrinsic test,” she wrote in her decision. It gets worse for Vance, too; Almadani deemed the lawsuit “frivolous” and ruled that the team had to pay Carey’s legal fees, writing that “egregious” conduct such as Vance’s “cause unnecessary delay and needlessly increase the costs of litigation.”
This is at least a little funny, given that Vance’s latest complaint against Carey included the phrase “Her hubris knowing no bounds.” Though the two songs do have the same title, it doesn’t take a musicologist to tell that they sound quite different. Carey’s is a Christmas track in the vein of Phil Spector, whereas the Vance track is more of a country tune, perhaps more reminiscent of the style of Elvis Presley’s “Blue Christmas.”
Carey’s lawyers argued that the similarities were far too coincidental to merit the suit, previously writing, “The 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 ‘Santa Claus’ and ‘mistletoe,’ and a few unprotectable pitches and chords randomly scattered throughout these completely different songs.” The musicologists called for the case agreed, with New York University professor Lawrence Ferrara claiming that he found “at least 19 songs” that used the same musical elements before Vance’s track. If that’s the case, it’s probably in Vance’s best interest that this doesn’t count as copyright infringement.
