A federal judge has dismissed a copyright lawsuit against Mariah Carey and her smash holiday hit All I Want for Christmas Is You.
The country singer Vince Vance of the band Vince Vance & the Valiants previously alleged that Carey had copied the group’s 1988 Christmas tune of the same name. Vance, whose real name is Adam Stone, accused Carey of exploiting his “popularity” and “style”.
On Wednesday, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani rejected the allegations, citing evidence from a musicologist that the songs only shared “commonplace Christmas song cliches” that are found in many other jingles. Carey’s attorneys previously argued that the language in Vance’s song had been been used in “legions of Christmas songs”, according to reporting from Billboard.
In one report, a New York University professor, Lawrence Ferrara, testified that he had found “at least 19 songs” that incorporated the same lyrical ideas that had been released before Vance’s track.
The judge reported that the plaintiffs “have not met their burden of showing that [the songs of] Carey and Vance are substantially similar under the extrinsic test”. The judge also called Vance and his lawyers’ conduct “egregious” and said they caused “unnecessary delay” and “needlessly” increased the costs of litigation, including through “incomprehensible mixtures of factual assertions and conclusions, subjective opinions, and other irrelevant evidence”.
Almadani additionally ordered them to repay Carey’s legal bills incurred while defending the case.
Vance first sued Carey in 2022 with allegations of copyright infringement. He claimed that his original track received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season – a year before Carey released her now huge hit.
He claimed that Carey “palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own”, in his latest complaint.
“Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun,” Vance wrote.
Carey’s All I Want for Christmas Is You is considered a modern Christmas classic, retaking the No 1 spot on the Billboard Hot 100 music chart for six straight years. It reportedly earned an incredible $8.5m in global revenue in 2022.
