Ed Sheeran won his plagiarism case. That's good for the future of music.

Ed Sheeran.
(Image credit: Illustrated | Getty Images, iStock)

It's big day for Ed Sheeran. In a ruling issued on Wednesday, a British court dismissed accusations that the pop star engaged in copyright infringement with his hit "Shape of You." Songwriters Ross Donoghue and Sami Chokri (who performs as Sami Switch) had argued Sheeran copied parts of their 2015 track "Oh Why," but the judge found these claims to be unsupported, noting comparable elements in a wide range of popular music and accepting Sheeran's contention that he had not heard "Oh Why" when he and his producers were writing "Shape of You."

You don't have to be a Sheeran fan to see the ruling as good news. At least since 2015, when a U.S. court found Robin Thicke plagiarized Marvin Gaye's song "Got to Give It Up," songwriters, performers, and record labels have become more vigilant about possible copyright infringement. The result, they claim, is less experimentation and more preemptive vetting by experts trained to detect even unintentional similarities to other material.

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Samuel Goldman

Samuel Goldman is a national correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is also an associate professor of political science at George Washington University, where he is executive director of the John L. Loeb, Jr. Institute for Religious Freedom and director of the Politics & Values Program. He received his Ph.D. from Harvard and was a postdoctoral fellow in Religion, Ethics, & Politics at Princeton University. His books include God's Country: Christian Zionism in America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018) and After Nationalism (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021). In addition to academic research, Goldman's writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and many other publications.