Music Lawsuit Over Thinking Out Loud: Trial, Appeals, and Impact

The lawsuit over “Thinking Out Loud” was a pair of copyright cases claiming Ed Sheeran’s 2014 hit copied Marvin Gaye’s 1973 song “Let’s Get It On,” and Sheeran won both. A Manhattan federal jury cleared him on May 4, 2023, a companion suit was thrown out on summary judgment days later, and the U.S. Supreme Court closed the door on the last appeal in June 2025.¹²

Who Sued Ed Sheeran

Two separate parties brought infringement claims, both tied to the estate of Ed Townsend, who co-wrote “Let’s Get It On” with Marvin Gaye and died in 2003 without a will. His estate was split equally among his three children.³

In July 2017, Townsend’s daughter Kathryn Townsend Griffin, along with co-heirs Helen McDonald and the Estate of Cherrigale Townsend, filed Griffin v. Sheeran in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (Case No. 1:17-cv-05221).⁴ They sued Sheeran and his co-writer Amy Wadge.

In June 2018, Structured Asset Sales, LLC, an investment firm founded by music industry executive David Pullman, filed a broader second lawsuit. SAS had purchased one of the three heir shares from Townsend’s son Clef Michael Townsend in a transaction approved by a California probate court.³ The SAS complaint named Sheeran, Wadge, their record labels, and Sony/ATV Music Publishing, and separately sought $100 million from Sony.⁵

What the Plaintiffs Said Was Copied

Neither side disputed that the melodies and lyrics of the two songs are different. The claim was about the groove. Plaintiffs pointed to a four-chord progression (notated I–iii–IV–V) played in a syncopated pattern where certain chords land slightly ahead of the beat, and called that combination the “heart” of “Let’s Get It On.” Their musicologist, University of Vermont professor Alexander Stewart, testified that roughly 70 percent of the musical value of “Thinking Out Loud” came from these shared elements.⁵

A fan-shot video from a November 2014 concert in Zurich, where Sheeran transitioned mid-performance between “Thinking Out Loud” and “Let’s Get It On,” became a central exhibit. Plaintiffs’ attorney Ben Crump called the clip a “smoking gun” and a “voluntary confession.” The defense argued it was misleading and prejudicial; Judge Louis Stanton allowed a 30-second excerpt to be shown.⁶

One legal constraint shaped everything the jury could consider. Because “Let’s Get It On” was registered before 1978, the Copyright Act of 1909 applied, and protection was limited to the five pages of sheet music deposited with the U.S. Copyright Office in 1973. The famous bass line and specific instrumental grooves from the recording were not in that deposit copy, so they were off-limits.⁵

How the Trial Played Out

The Griffin v. Sheeran trial opened in April 2023 in Manhattan federal court, with Ben Crump representing the Townsend heirs in his first music-copyright case.⁵

The case turned on the musicologists. Stewart argued the two songs shared a distinctive syncopated rhythm and chord pattern. NYU music professor Lawrence Ferrara, testifying for Sheeran, called that analysis “farcical.” Ferrara told jurors he had found 80 songs using the same chord progression, 33 of them predating “Let’s Get It On,” and that the progression appeared in beginner guitar and piano instruction books.⁷

Sheeran took the stand with a guitar. He demonstrated that his song used a different chord voicing than the plaintiffs’ expert had identified, and played mashups of pop songs over the same progression to make his point that “you can kind of play most pop songs over most pop songs.”⁵ On the Zurich clip: “Quite frankly, if I’d done what you’re accusing me of doing, I’d be quite an idiot to stand on a stage in front of 20,000 people and do that.”⁶ He told the court he would quit music if the jury ruled against him.⁸

Amy Wadge testified as well, backing Sheeran’s account that the two of them built the song from scratch during an evening at his home in England in February 2014.⁹¹⁰

On May 4, 2023, after about three hours of deliberation, the jury found Sheeran had not infringed.¹ The verdict accepted his account of independent creation and treated the shared elements as common musical building blocks rather than protected expression.¹¹ After the reading, Griffin and her family approached Sheeran, hugged him, and told him, “We believe you.”¹²

Sheeran released a statement calling the lawsuit “baseless” and warning that reliance on musicologists offering “misleading comparisons” was “dangerous” to songwriters. He likened basic chord progressions to an “alphabet” and said “no one owns them or the way they are played, in the same way, nobody owns the colour blue.”¹³ He added: “I am not and will never allow myself to be a piggy bank for anyone to shake.”¹⁴

The Second Lawsuit and the Appeals

Twelve days after the jury verdict, on May 16, 2023, Judge Stanton dismissed the Structured Asset Sales case on summary judgment, ruling that the disputed musical elements were commonplace and unprotectable.⁴ The Townsend heirs filed a notice of appeal from the jury verdict on June 1, 2023, but that appeal was terminated by September 2023 without further proceedings.¹⁵

SAS kept fighting. It appealed to the Second Circuit, where oral argument was heard in April 2024.¹⁶ On November 1, 2024, a three-judge panel of Judges Calabresi, Parker, and Park affirmed. The court held that copyright for works registered under the 1909 Act is limited to the “four corners” of the deposited sheet music, that the four-chord progression and syncopated harmonic rhythm were “commonplace” and “garden variety” building blocks, and that protecting their combination would create an “impermissible monopoly over a basic musical building block.” It also found no reasonable jury could deem the songs substantially similar when their melodies and lyrics were “entirely dissimilar.”¹⁷

SAS sought rehearing by the full Second Circuit, which was denied in December 2024, then petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court in March 2025.¹⁶ On June 16, 2025, the Supreme Court denied certiorari without comment, ending the litigation.²

Why the Case Mattered Beyond One Song

The suit landed in the long shadow of the 2015 Blurred Lines verdict, in which a jury found Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had infringed Marvin Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up” by copying its “feel,” even though the two songs did not share specific melodies, chord sequences, or lyrics. The Gaye heirs were awarded $7.4 million, at the time the largest damages award in a music copyright case.¹⁸ The Ninth Circuit upheld it in 2018, with a dissent warning of a “dangerous precedent” allowing a musical “style” or “groove” to be copyrighted.¹⁹

A wave of copyright claims followed against artists including Drake, Olivia Rodrigo, and Dua Lipa, and some songwriters began preemptively adding writing credits from older songs to head off suits.⁴²⁰ The Sheeran outcome, and especially the Second Circuit ruling, cut the other way, reaffirming that common chord progressions and rhythmic patterns are not protectable. Legal commentators described it as a possible “turning of the tide” back toward core copyright principles. Songwriter-producer Sean Garrett called it “1-1” between Blurred Lines and the Sheeran result, saying “I don’t think it brought clarity. I still feel that it’s case-by-case, unfortunately.”

Sheeran’s Other Copyright Fights

The “Thinking Out Loud” cases were not Sheeran’s only brush with infringement claims. He settled a dispute over “Photograph” in 2016 for a reported £16 million after claims it copied Matt Cardle’s “Amazing,” and settled a claim over “The Rest of Our Life,” a Tim McGraw and Faith Hill collaboration, in 2018.⁴ In 2022, a U.K. High Court ruled for him against songwriter Sami Chokri’s allegation that “Shape of You” copied “Oh Why,” finding he had “neither deliberately nor subconsciously” taken the disputed phrase. After that ruling, he said such claims “have become a culture where a claim is made with the idea that a settlement will be cheaper than taking it to court, even if there is no basis for the claim.”²¹ Taking “Thinking Out Loud” to a verdict rather than settling fit that stance.

1
ABC News. Jury Reaches Verdict in Ed Sheeran Copyright Infringement Case
2
Authors Alliance. Bonds, Beats, and Lawsuits: How Ed Sheeran Won
3
George Washington University Law School. Structured Asset Sales v. Sheeran Complaint
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WIPO Magazine. Ed Sheeran Succeeds in Music Copyright Infringement Case
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New Yorker. Ed Sheeran Copyright Infringement Lawsuit
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Variety. Ed Sheeran Copyright Trial: Singer Takes the Stand
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Bloomberg Law. Ed Sheeran Copyright Trial Hinges on Music Experts, Song History
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The Independent. Ed Sheeran Missed Grandmother’s Funeral for Court Trial
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Law Point Uganda. Chords, Copyright, and Creativity: The Ed Sheeran v. Marvin Gaye Case
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Good Morning America. Ed Sheeran Plays Mash-Up of Marvin Gaye Songs in Testimony
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Guardian. Ed Sheeran Not Liable in Marvin Gaye Copyright Lawsuit
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People. Ed Sheeran Copyright Lawsuit: What Kathryn Townsend Griffin Said in Court
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Billboard. Ed Sheeran Speaks Out on Thinking Out Loud Case
14
Variety. Ed Sheeran Acquitted of Plagiarizing Marvin Gaye Song
15
PACER Monitor. Griffin v. Sheeran Case Details
16
U.S. Supreme Court. Structured Asset Sales LLC Corrected Petition for Certiorari
17
FindLaw. Structured Asset Sales v. Sheeran, No. 23-905
18
UT Austin Ethics Unwrapped. Blurred Lines Copyright Case Study
19
Harvard Law School. Blurred Lines: Copyright and the Creative Process
20
Hollywood Reporter. Ed Sheeran Thinking Out Loud Win Analysis
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NPR. Ed Sheeran Wins Copyright Lawsuit Over Shape of You