Sam Smith and Normani are once again seeking to throw out a lawsuit that claims their 2019 hit “Dancing With a Stranger” stole its hook from an earlier song.
Lawyers for Smith, Normani and a collection of co-writers and publishers filed a so-called summary judgment motion on Tuesday (July 7) urging a judge to end the copyright claims without a trial. The 2022 lawsuit alleges “Dancing With a Stranger,” which hit No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent 45 weeks on the chart, infringes the 2015 song “Dancing With Strangers” by an artist named Jordan Vincent.
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A federal judge previously dismissed the case in 2023, but an appeals court revived it last year after determining that there’s a legitimate dispute as to whether the two songs have “substantially similar” hooks built around the phrase “dancing with a stranger.” This triggered a second phase of the litigation focused on whether there’s evidence that Smith and Normani copied Vincent.
Following the discovery process, Vincent has conceded that there’s no evidence showing that the “Dancing With a Stranger” songwriting team ever heard “Dancing With Strangers.” This means that to win the case at trial, Vincent would have to prove the two songs are “strikingly similar” — that is, nearly identical to a degree that copying is the only logical explanation.
Smith and Normani’s lawyers argue in Tuesday’s motion that Vincent “does not come close to meeting that demanding standard.” They say the two works share only “meager” similarities that were “freely floating in popular music” before 2015, including in the 1989 Cyndi Lauper song “Dancing With a Stranger” and the 1997 Regina track “Dancing With an Angel.”
“The similarities amount to a four-word phrase, ‘dancing with a stranger’ — which has appeared in more than fifteen songs before plaintiff’s song — and some unprotected pitches and rhythms in each song’s otherwise different melodies to which that phrase is sung,” write Smith and Normani’s lawyers from powerhouse media litigation firm Davis Wright Tremaine. “These similarities are not unique or so complex as to render coincidence virtually impossible.”
The Davis Wright attorneys also say in the motion that they’ve recently discovered another “independent, fatal defect” in the lawsuit: Vincent’s “Dancing With Strangers” actually sampled two earlier tracks without licenses, “The Ha Dance” by Masters at Work and “Think (About It)” by Lyn Collins, rendering Vincent’s copyright invalid.
Tuesday’s brief includes a section from Vincent’s lawyer, AJ Fluehr, opposing Smith and Norman’s summary judgment motion. Fluehr argues that there is genuine evidence of striking similarity to justify holding a jury trial, including that the two hooks share “virtually identical” pitch sequences and “nearly identical” melodic contours on top of the same lyrical phrasing.
“There are no works…in [the] history of the world which have anything close to the selection and arrangement shared by both [songs],” reads Fluehr’s response. “It is not an accident that this rare bit of expression appears in both songs in virtually identical aesthetic contexts for the first time in history a couple months apart; it is a fingerprint linking them”
Fluehr says in his section of the brief that the issue of sampling is “frivolous” and irrelevant to the case. He also points out that in 2015, Smith gave post-release writing credit to Tom Petty due to claims that his 2014 hit “Stay With Me” sounded similar to “Won’t Back Down.” Fluehr says this is “a further indication that defendants’ songwriting process is not independent, and does at times use other works.” Smith’s attorneys call that suggestion “outlandish.”
A federal judge is set to consider the summary judgment motion at an August hearing in Los Angeles. He’ll then decide whether to shut down the case or send it to trial. There’s also still the possibility the claims could get resolved via settlement.
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