Mariah Carey has been sued by songwriter Vince Vance, who claims that she stole “All I Want for Christmas is You” from him. This is the second time Vince has sued Mariah, as a previous lawsuit making the same allegations was dropped last year.
In a complaint filed on November 1, Vince claims that Mariah’s 1994 track “All I Want for Christmas is You” infringes on the copyrights to his 1989 song of the same name.
He is now represented by Gerard P. Fox – the same lawyer who sued Taylor Swift over accusations she stole the lyrics to “Shake it Off” – with a new, far more personal and detailed case. One claim details that Mariah’s co-writer on the track, Walter Afanasieff, disputes her story of how she wrote the song.
“Carey has without licensing, palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Vance’s lawyers wrote in the complaint. “Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun. This is simply a case of actionable infringement.”
The new version of the lawsuit also claims that Mariah copied musical elements from Vince’s song.
“The phrase ‘all I want for Christmas is you’ may seem like a common parlance today, in 1988 it was, in context, distinctive,” Vance’s lawyers wrote. “Moreover, the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50% clone of Vance’s original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions.”
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