Jury to rule on Ed Sheeran copied Marvin Gaye’s song or not

A US judge has ruled a jury will decide whether or not Ed Sheeran is guilty of ripping off Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On for his hit Thinking Out Loud.

District Judge Louis Stanton rejected Sheeran’s request to dismiss the lawsuit and in a decision made public on Thursday said there were “substantial similarities between several of the two works’ musical elements”.

Sheeran, 27, denies ripping off sections of the 1973 classic for his number one hit Thinking Out Loud.

The lawsuit was brought by the estate and heirs of late producer Ed Townsend, who co-wrote Let’s Get It On with Gaye.

The action has been brought against Sheeran, Sony/ATV Music Publishing and Atlantic Records.

Judge Stanton is also overseeing a separate $100m lawsuit over the same track launched last June by the company Structured Asset Sales, which owns part of the copyright in Gaye's song.

Judge Stanton said the similarities between the two songs included their bass lines and percussion and said listeners might consider the songs' "aesthetic appeal" to be similar.

He said there was disagreement over whether the harmonic and rhythmic composition of Gaye's song was too common to merit copyright protection.

Sheeran's defence team has argued that Thinking Out Loud is different because it has "sombre, melancholic tones, addressing long-lasting romantic love" while Let's Get It On is characterized as a "sexual anthem".

Sheeran and the record companies have not yet responded to Judge Stanton's ruling.

Thinking Out Loud reached number one in the UK singles charts in November 2014 while Let’s Get It On hit number one in the US in September 1973.

In 2017 Sheeran settled a $20m copyright infringement claim against him in the US, over his hit song Photograph.

Songwriters Thomas Leonard and Martin Harrington had sued the singer in 2016, claiming his hit ballad had a similar structure to their song Amazing.

Also in 2017, the team behind TLC's 1999 single No Scrubs were given writing credits on Ed Sheeran's Shape of You. It came after critics and fans made comparisons between elements of the songs.