They may only be two words, but they are worth tens of millions of pounds. The ascending one-bar phrase “Oh I” from Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You became the focus of a plagiarism row that threw into question the very art of songwriting itself.
Over the course of an 11-day trial, Sheeran and his co-writers, John McDaid and Steve McCutcheon, faced accusations that they had ripped off the 2015 song Oh Why by the grime singer Sami Chokri and songwriter Ross O’Donoghue.
