Singer-songwriter and record producer Mariah Carey has been accused for copyright infringement. A country music songwriter has claimed copyright encroachment over ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
Reports say Mariah and co-writer Walter Afansieff are named in the claim by songwriter Andy Stone, who asserts his ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ by Vince Vance and the Valiants from 1989 is being encroached.
Stone filed his papers in the US District Court in the Eastern District of Louisiana. While the tunes have a similar title, there is just a smidgen of Mariah’s song or verses beyond the title call-out. Her rendition of the tune was released in 1994 and has become a vacation staple on radio, streaming, and the NBA’s yearly record of games on Christmas Day.
Stone claims his song received extensive airplay during the 1993 holiday season. He is asking for $20 million in damages. Stone claims Mariah and Afansieff “intentionally engaged in a campaign to infringe” his copyright on the work.
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Pamela Koslyn, a Los Angeles lawyer having some expertise in music and intellectual property rights, noted there are 177 works, a large number of them melodic compositions, with ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ as the title. Koslyn noticed that she would have an alternate response assuming that every one of the verses are “significantly comparative” to Carey’s rendition.
Koslyn said in a statement received by ‘Deadline’:
Song titles aren’t entitled to copyright protection. That’s why there are 177 works using the same title. An even more popular title is ‘My Baby’, which has 4860 works registered with the Copyright Office. And that doesn’t even count ‘common law’ (unregistered) works using the same title.”
The Mariah Carey’s version of the song has over 1 billion streams on Spotify. Last year, it was the first tune to be a No. 1 hit in three separate sudden runs in demand on the Billboard Hot 100 Singles chart.