Marvin Gaye’s family wants to halt all sales of “Blurred Lines”

By Katie Rife | March 11, 2015 | 4:48pm

Aux Features Music

We’re all about free speech here at The A.V. Club, but here’s one bit of potential court-ordered censorship that we don’t really mind: Rolling Stone reports that Marvin Gaye’s family wants a federal court to stop all sales of “Blurred Lines.” This news comes after Gaye’s family won a major victory in that same court yesterday, when a jury rejected Robin Thicke’s argument that he couldn’t be held responsible for the song because he was high at the time—a.k.a. “the Afroman defense”—and ordered Thicke and co-songwriter (or sole songwriter, based on his testimony) Pharrell Williams to pay the Gayes $7.3 million for ripping off Marvin Gaye’s 1977 song “Got To Give It Up.”

However, that $7.3 million number didn’t include allowances for future profits from “Blurred Lines.” Therefore, the Gayes’ lawyer, Richard Busch, wants the court to file an injunction to stop all sales and distribution of the song until an agreement between the two parties can be reached, a potentially devastating blow to douchey nightclubs and 2013-themed parties thrown by people with a curiously accelerated sense of nostalgia worldwide. (You’re still free to play “Thrift Shop” all you want, though.) Busch says he’ll be asking the court to halt sales next week, so if for some reason you didn’t get enough of “Blurred Lines” two summers ago, better hurry and download it now.