A songwriter who unsuccessfully sued Mariah Carey over “All I Want for Christmas is You” is pleading with a judge to reject demands that he repay her six-figure legal bill, warning it would push an “elderly man” to “the brink of a financial collapse.”
After beating Vince Vance’s copyright lawsuit over her holiday classic, Carey, Sony Music and other defendants told the judge earlier this month that they had paid nearly $186,000 to a team of lawyers to defeat “frivolous” motions advanced by Vance’s attorneys.
But in a response filing on Monday, Vance’s lawyers said that such a award was “simply not reasonable” and completely out of proportion for the amount of litigation at issue – and that it could bankrupt an an “elderly man now without vast resources.”
“The plaintiff is elder and living off his music catalog and some touring,” the songwriter’s attorneys say. “One artist should not push another artist to the brink of a financial collapse.”
Vance (real name Andy Stone) first sued Carey in 2022, claiming “All I Want” infringed the copyrights to a 1989 song of the exact same name by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. He said his track had received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.
The case was a big deal because Carey’s song is big business. The 1994 hit, which became even more popular after it appeared in the 2003 holiday rom-com Love Actually, has re-taken the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and earned a whopping $8.5 million in revenue in 2022.
But in a ruling last month, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani said Vance had failed to show that the songs were similar enough to violate copyright law. She cited analysis by a musicologist who said the two tracks were “very different songs” that shared only “commonplace Christmas song clichés” that had been used in many earlier tracks.
The judge not only tossed out Vance’s case, but also ruled that he and his lawyers should be punished for advancing meritless arguments that the judge said were aimed to “cause unnecessary delay and needlessly increase the costs of litigation.”
Earlier this month, Carey and the other defendants told the judge they had paid a combined $185,602.30 for a total of 295 hours to defeat those motions. They said they spent a lot because Vance was demanding “drastic” thing, like $20 million in damages and the “destruction” of all copies of Carey’s song.
Carey, repped by Peter Anderson and others from the law firm Davis Wright Tremaine, asked for about $141,000; Walter Afanasieff, a co-writer on Carey’s track repped by Kenneth D. Freundlich, asked for $7,000; Sony Music, represented by Benjamin Akley, Donald Zakarin, Ilene Farkas and others from Pryor Cashman, asked for $32,000; and Kobalt, repped by Bert Deixler and others from Kendall Brill & Kelly LLP, asked for $5,000.
But in Tuesday’s response, Vance’s lawyer (Gerard P. Fox) said those demands were far too high for a case that he said had been filed with good intentions and sound legal reasoning.
“He heard something that to him seemed substantially similar and spent money that is sparse for him on two of the top musicologists in the country and asked them for their independent opinions, and they both gave him the same opinion: there was infringement,” Fox writes.
“The loss of this case … is staggering enough for this plaintiff and saddling him with $185,000 of big law firm billing that is unreasonable and forcing him to sell parts of his catalogue of music will accomplish nothing,” the lawyer writes.
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