Mariah Carey’s festive song All I Want For Christmas Is You is one of the bestselling Yuletide tracks of the last 30 years.
Now she has been cleared of any copyright infringement in a US court ruling made Wednesday.
BBC News reports that songwriter Adam Stone alleged that Carey, who released her song in 1994, “exploited his popularity and style” after his song with the same name was released five years before, recorded under his performing name of Vince Vance (and the Valiants). He claimed at least $20million in damages.
Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani accepted expert testimony that the two songs shared “Christmas song cliches,” and that Stone and his team had not met their burden “of showing the songs were substantially similar.”
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In rejecting Stone’s case, the judge also imposed sanctions for filing “frivolous” arguments and ordered that Stone and his lawyers pay Carey’s legal bills.
The BBC reports that, in her 2020 memoir, Carey wrote she had composed “most of the song on a cheap little Casio keyboard,” while playing the movie It’s a Wonderful Life for inspiration, before completing it in the studio with her co-writer Walter Afanasieff.
Carey’s song is one of the most popular Christmas songs of all time, reported to earn its writers approximately $8.5million every year.
It has spent 140 weeks in the UK’s top 100 music chart, and is estimated to have made approximately $100million since its release. It was the lead single from Carey’s fourth studio album, and in 2023 was selected by the Library of Congress for inclusion in the National Recording Registry.
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