Jury finds Ed Sheeran didn't plagiarize Marvin Gaye's 'Let's Get It On' for his

The heirs of Ed Townsend, the cocomposer of Gaye's "Let's Get It On" accused Sheeran of stealing bits of the 1973 classic for "Thinking Out Loud."

• A jury found Ed Sheeran's hit "Thinking Out Loud" doesn't infringe on the copyright of "Let's Get It On."
• A Manhattan jury returned the verdict around 1 p.m. Thursday.
• Sheeran denied stealing the melody and "harmonic rhythm" from Marvin Gaye's 1973 soul classic.

A jury in Manhattan on Friday found that Ed Sheeran did not plagiarize Marvin Gaye's 1973 soul classic, "Let's Get It On," when he wrote his own hit, "Thinking Out Loud," forty years later.

The heirs of Ed Townsend, the co-composer of Gaye's hit, had accused Sheeran in a federal lawsuit of stealing a four-chord progression and the general shape of some melodies from the song.

"I am just a guy with a guitar who loves writing music for people to enjoy," Sheeran told reporters in a statement after his victory.

"I am not and will never allow myself to be a piggy bank for anyone to shake." 

—Laura Italiano (@Italiano_Laura) May 4, 2023

Townsend's family — including his daughter Kathryn Townsend-Griffin, his sister Helen McDonald, and the estate of his late wife, Cherrigale — first filed the lawsuit in 2017. They wanted to prevent Sheeran from ever performing "Thinking Out Loud" again, as well as money damages estimated to be in the millions.  

Sheeran's defense argued that the chord progression of the song is actually common to many pop songs and that Sheeran and his co-writer Amy Wadge "independently created" the song after having an "emotional conversation," according to ABC News.

Sheeran himself testified in the trial, telling jurors the chords were not the same, and demonstrating on a guitar how many songs written before and after "Let's Get it On" sound similar but are not plagiarized.

Ben Crump, a lawyer for Townsend's family, had argued that Sheeran performing a mash-up of "Thinking Out Loud" and "Let's Get it On" during a concert in Switzerland was the "smoking gun" to prove the British singer-songwriter had knowingly plagiarized Gaye's hit. 

But Sheeran maintained his innocence, telling the court "If I had done what you're accusing me of doing I'd be quite an idiot to stand on stage in front of 25,000 people."

And this copyright infringement trial isn't Sheeran's first — he won a $1.1 million lawsuit last year after UK singer Sami Switch accused Sheeran's "Shape of You" song of plagiarizing from Switch's 2015 song "Oh Why," according to Billboard.

Marvin Gaye's music has also been the subject of similar cases in the past. In 2015, Gaye's heirs won their lawsuit against Pharrell and Robin Thicke, whose song "Blurred Lines" was found to be plagiarized from Gaye's "Got to Give it Up."