Ed Sheeran Beat Two Marvin Gaye Copyright Suits — How He Won

Ed Sheeran spent nearly a decade in federal court defending “Thinking Out Loud” against claims that he copied Marvin Gaye’s 1973 classic “Let’s Get It On.” Two separate plaintiffs sued him over the same four chords. The heirs of Ed Townsend, Gaye’s co-writer, demanded $100 million. A royalty-trading firm called Structured Asset Sales demanded its own cut.

Sheeran won both fights. A Manhattan jury cleared him in the Townsend case in May 2023. The Second Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed a separate summary judgment win against Structured Asset Sales in November 2024, and the U.S. Supreme Court refused to hear SAS’s appeal of that ruling in June 2025. Both cases are now closed.

Ed Sheeran Thinking Out Loud Lawsuit Timeline and Updates

1973 — “Let’s Get It On” Is Registered Under the Old Copyright Act

Marvin Gaye and Ed Townsend co-wrote “Let’s Get It On” and registered it with the U.S. Copyright Office that year. The 1909 Copyright Act governed the registration.

That detail would matter more than anyone realized at the time. Under the 1909 Act, only sheet music could be deposited and protected, not the studio recording.

2014 — Sheeran Releases “Thinking Out Loud”

Sheeran co-wrote “Thinking Out Loud” with Amy Wadge in 2015 and released it that year. The song became one of his signature ballads, streamed and purchased more than 4.2 million times.

It shared a chord progression with “Let’s Get It On.” So do thousands of other songs.

2015 — Structured Asset Sales Acquires a Royalty Stake

Investment banker David Pullman’s firm, Structured Asset Sales, purchased a one-ninth interest in Townsend’s one-third share of “Let’s Get It On” royalties. SAS specializes in buying songwriting royalty interests and securitizing them for investors.

Pullman’s firm does not write music. It trades in the right to sue over it.

July 2017 — Griffin v. Sheeran Filed

Kathryn Townsend Griffin, Ed Townsend’s daughter, filed suit against Sheeran and Wadge in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York. Helen McDonald, Townsend’s sister, and the estate of Townsend’s wife Cherrigale joined as plaintiffs.

Griffin had inherited a third of her father’s songwriting share. The complaint demanded $100 million in damages.

2018 — Structured Asset Sales Files Its Own Suit

SAS filed a separate lawsuit in the same Manhattan federal court, also targeting “Thinking Out Loud.” Sony/ATV Music Publishing, Atlantic Recording Corporation, and several smaller publishing entities were named alongside Sheeran.

This is the pattern that defined the entire litigation: two plaintiffs, one set of facts, two separate trials years apart.

April 2021 — Sheeran Moves for Summary Judgment in the SAS Case

Sheeran argued that combining two unprotectable musical elements, the chord progression and the syncopated harmonic rhythm, did not create something original enough for copyright protection. The district court initially denied the motion.

Judge Louis Stanton found the originality question disputed enough to send to a jury. The case moved toward trial alongside the Griffin litigation.

April 2023 — Griffin v. Sheeran Goes to Trial

The Griffin case proceeded to trial in the Southern District of New York before a Manhattan jury. Plaintiffs opened with a video of Sheeran performing a live mashup of “Thinking Out Loud” and “Let’s Get It On,” arguing the seamless blend was itself an admission of copying.

Sheeran testified that he first heard “Let’s Get It On” as a child in an “Austin Powers” film. He said he could not avoid the chord progression because it underlies huge portions of popular music.

May 4, 2023 — Jury Clears Sheeran

The jury returned a verdict for Sheeran, finding he had independently created “Thinking Out Loud” and had not copied protectable elements of “Let’s Get It On.” Harvard Law lecturer Louis Tompros, who followed the case closely, had warned beforehand that juries struggle to evaluate sheet music they cannot read.

That difficulty cut in Sheeran’s favor. The jury sided with the defense on every count.

2023–2024 — District Court Revisits the SAS Case

With the Griffin verdict in hand, Sheeran’s team asked the district court to reconsider its earlier denial of summary judgment in the SAS case. The court granted reconsideration.

Judge Stanton ruled that the chord progression and harmonic rhythm in “Let’s Get It On” were “so commonplace, in isolation and in combination,” that protecting their pairing would hand Gaye’s estate an improper monopoly over a basic musical building block. Summary judgment for Sheeran followed.

November 1, 2024 — Second Circuit Affirms

SAS appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, case No. 23-905. A three-judge panel including Judges Calabresi and Parker affirmed the district court’s ruling in full.

The panel’s reasoning rested on the 1909 Act’s deposit-copy rule: protection extends only to the sheet music filed with the Copyright Office in 1973, not to anything captured later on Gaye’s studio recording. “Overprotecting such basic elements would threaten to stifle creativity and undermine the purpose of copyright law,” the panel wrote.

March 6, 2025 — SAS Petitions the Supreme Court

SAS filed a certiorari petition asking the Supreme Court to take the case. The petition argued the Second Circuit had wrongly deferred to the Copyright Office’s compendium of practices in defining the scope of the 1973 deposit copy.

SAS leaned on the Supreme Court’s own 2024 ruling in Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, which eliminated Chevron deference to federal agencies on ambiguous statutory questions. The argument: if courts can no longer defer to agencies on regulatory interpretation generally, the Second Circuit should not have deferred to the Copyright Office on what counts as a valid 1973 deposit.

June 2025 — Supreme Court Denies Cert

The Supreme Court denied SAS’s petition without comment in June 2025. That denial ended the SAS litigation over the composition copyright permanently.

Pullman told reporters the company was reviewing its options. SAS has filed a separate, still-pending suit against Sheeran based on rights tied to Gaye’s actual studio recording rather than the sheet music. That case remains on hold.

The Deposit-Copy Rule, Explained

This is the legal mechanism that decided both cases: copyright law before 1978 protected only what a songwriter physically filed with the government.

For “Let’s Get It On,” that meant sheet music. Not the bassline. Not the vocal phrasing. Not anything that exists only on the 1973 recording.

SAS wanted the jury and the courts to hear Gaye’s actual recording, where the bassline and groove make the similarity to “Thinking Out Loud” sound much stronger to a casual listener. The district court excluded that recording before trial because it was not part of the 1973 deposit.

The Ninth Circuit reached the identical conclusion in the Led Zeppelin “Stairway to Heaven” case, refusing to let a jury hear the studio recording of the Spirit song “Taurus.” Two different circuits, two different bands, the same archaic rule controlling the outcome.

What Made the Selection-and-Arrangement Theory Fail

SAS did not argue the chord progression alone was protectable. No competent copyright lawyer would, since a I–iii–IV–V progression appears in songs going back decades before Gaye ever wrote anything.

SAS argued the specific combination of that chord progression with a syncopated harmonic rhythm was original enough to deserve protection on its own terms. This is called a selection-and-arrangement theory.

The theory requires combining unprotectable elements in a way that is itself sufficiently creative and numerous to clear the originality bar. Judge Stanton rejected it on the numbers alone: two elements is not “numerous.” The Second Circuit agreed.

What matters here is the precedent this sets for every future case built the same way. A plaintiff cannot rescue an unoriginal melody by pointing to an unoriginal rhythm and calling the pairing unique. Courts now have two clear rulings, one jury verdict and one appellate opinion, saying that combination needs far more than two commonplace pieces to survive.

Why Two Lawsuits Existed Over the Same Song

The Griffin and SAS cases proceeded on separate tracks because the plaintiffs held different rights and different theories, even though both targeted the same recording.

Griffin sued as an heir asserting the Townsend family’s songwriting interest directly. SAS sued as a purchased financial stake, litigating the same underlying composition through a separate ownership chain that Pullman’s company had acquired specifically to monetize.

That distinction explains why a jury cleared Sheeran in 2023 and the SAS case still needed a second, separate appellate ruling in 2024 to close. Different plaintiffs, different procedural postures, same musical material, same ultimate result.

SAS’s pending third lawsuit, based on actual sound-recording rights rather than the 1973 sheet music, exists for the same structural reason. Sound recordings carry separate copyright protection that did not even exist federally until 1972, opening a narrow and different legal door that the deposit-copy ruling does not fully close.

Sheeran’s Pattern of Settlements Versus This Win

Sheeran has not always fought to verdict. In 2016, he and co-writer Johnny McDaid settled a claim that “Photograph” copied Matt Cardle’s “Amazing” for £16 million.

In 2018, he settled a separate claim that “The Rest of Our Life,” a song he wrote for Faith Hill and Tim McGraw, copied Australian songwriters Sean Carey and Beau Golden’s “When I Found You.” Those settlements were later used as similar-fact evidence against him at the Griffin trial, an attempt to show a pattern of borrowing.

The pattern did not work in plaintiffs’ favor here. Sheeran did fight a UK claim over “Shape of You” in 2018, brought by Sam Chokri over the song “Oh Why,” and won that case outright in the High Court of England and Wales in 2022, with the court finding no deliberate or subconscious copying.

Taken together, Sheeran’s litigation record shows a clear shift starting around 2022: settle when the claim has commercial logic behind it, fight when the claim rests on commonplace musical building blocks. The “Thinking Out Loud” cases became the test of that second strategy at the highest stakes yet, and it held.

What This Case Changed for Songwriters

The ruling does not eliminate music copyright claims built on chord progressions. It raises the bar substantially for claims built on commonplace ones.

Sheeran addressed the broader industry effect directly during a 2026 tour stop in Sydney, telling a crowd of 70,000 that the eight-year legal battle reshaped how he thought about creative risk and litigation exposure as a working songwriter.

The case also produced an unusual artifact: discovery required Sheeran to surrender his personal phone, a device he had not used since 2015. Reviewing years of old messages for the litigation inspired “Old Phone,” a track on his 2025 album “Play.” Few copyright defendants turn their own discovery process into a hit song, but Sheeran’s account of the experience underscores how disruptive this litigation became, even for the winning side.

Music industry attorneys now cite both rulings, the Griffin jury verdict and the SAS appellate decision, as the strongest available precedent against speculative infringement claims targeting basic harmonic patterns. The Red Bull Gives You Wings settlement showed a different kind of consumer-facing claim resolve through payout; this case shows what happens when a copyright claim instead goes the distance and loses on the merits at every stage.

What This Lawsuit Teaches Consumers

Here is the throughline for anyone following music copyright disputes: not every resemblance is theft, and the law has specific, technical reasons for drawing that line.

A four-chord progression shared by thousands of songs is not evidence of copying. A syncopated rhythm pattern common across genres is not evidence of copying. Combining the two does not automatically create something new enough to own.

The deposit-copy rule sounds like a technicality, and in a sense it is. It is also the rule that prevented a private equity-backed royalty fund from using a 1973 studio recording, rather than the actual filed composition, to manufacture a stronger-sounding infringement claim than the law was ever meant to support.

For songwriters facing similar claims, the lesson from both Griffin and SAS is consistent: originality has to live in something more than the raw ingredients every musician reaches for. Sheeran proved that twice, in two different courts, over nearly a decade. The price of proving it, in legal fees and years of his life, is the part the verdicts and the appellate opinions never have to account for.

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