Photo Credit: Sam Smith, Normani – Dancing With A Stranger (Official Music Video)
A federal appeals court has revived a copyright infringement lawsuit filed against Sam Smith and Normani over their 2019 hit “Dancing With a Stranger,” alleging it copied aspects of a similarly named song from 2015. On Tuesday, a three-judge panel of the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed a lower court’s decision to dismiss the case.
According to the appeals court, a jury could find the hooks of the two songs to be “substantially similar.” Ultimately, a California federal judge will reconsider the matter.
Sound and Color, copyright holder of “Dancing With Strangers” by Jordan Vincent and music duo SKX, filed the initial lawsuit in 2022. The filing alleged the song’s title, lyrics, melody, and overall production copied elements of the earlier track.
Smith’s song has a noticeably slower tempo, but the lawsuit claimed the similarities are undeniable when the tracks are played at the same speed. Further, it asserted the underlying composition of both songs is “nearly identical,” and their hooks share the same lyrics and arrangement of phrasing.
The case was dismissed by a California federal court in 2023, determining that the two songs were not substantially similar other than the phrasing of the title. But that was determined too general to be protected by copyright law.
“As Sound and Color’s experts opined, the hooks share the same combination of several musical elements, including the same lyrics, the same ‘metric placement’ at the beginning of each syllable, and the same downward ‘melodic contour’ that starts at pitch 7 and ends at pitch 3,” they wrote.
“Defendants’ exhibit containing forty-three audio excerpts of songs with similar lyrics but differences in rhythm, pitch sequence, and melodic contour illustrates the ‘wide range of possible expression and broad creative choices’ involved in crafting a hook and thereby shows that broad copyright protection is appropriate.”
The order arrives at a crossroads for similar cases, which for a while seem to have trended in favor of the artist being sued. Ed Sheeran won in two lawsuits that went before juries over his songs “Shape of You” and “Thinking Out Loud.” But cases of this nature can go either way; more often these days, such cases have been going before a jury due to the nuance involved in determining whether infringement has taken place.
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Copyright Lawsuit Over Sam Smith and Normani’s ‘Dancing With a Stranger’ Revived – Digital Music News
