Why Ed Sheeran's court victory sounds good for the music industry

By Hayleigh Bosher, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, Brunel University London

There’s a good chance you’ve heard a song by Ed Sheeran called Shape of You. It’s been streamed over 3 billion times on Spotify and viewed over 5 billion times on YouTube.

The song Oh Why, by Sam Chokri, is less well known. But Chokri claimed that Sheeran had copied it when composing his hugely successful track.

That long-running claim has now been dismissed after a judge decided that, while the two songs are similar, Sheeran had “neither deliberately nor subconsciously copied” Chokri’s composition. The verdict was no doubt a relief for Sheeran, and should be celebrated…

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