Mariah Carey has been cleared in the lawsuit over her 1994 Christmas colossus ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani granted Carey's request for summary judgment, giving her and co-writer and co-defendant Walter Afanasieff a victory without going to trial.
The country singer Andy Stone – who performs under the stage name Vince Vance – had filed a $20 million suit against Carey in a Los Angeles federal court in November 2023.
Stone' suit said “'All I Want For Christmas Is You' contains a unique linguistic structure where a person, disillusioned with expensive gifts and seasonal comforts, wants to be with their loved one, and accordingly writes a letter to Santa Claus.” It highlighted an “overwhelming likelihood” Carey had heard the song and infringed copyright by taking significant elements from it.
“If you look at both songs, you can see that about 50 per cent of the words are the same, in almost the same order. I think it’s a pretty strong claim,” the plaintiff’s lawyer, Douglas M. Schmidt, previously said.
Judge Monica Ramirez Almadini ruled that Stone’s lawyers had not “met their burden of showing” that the two songs were “substantially similar”.
Instead, Almadini referred to expert testimony that testified that rather than breaching copyright laws, the two songs simply shared “Christmas song cliches” that had been present in several earlier songs.
The judge added that Stone and his lawyers should now face sanctions for filing “frivolous” arguments, including “vague and incomprehensible mixtures of factual assertions and conclusions, subjective opinions and other irrelevant evidence”.
They have also been instructed to pay Carey’s legal bills for the case.
