Ed Sheeran has won his copyright case: he was right to fight, music cannot be written in fear

Ed Sheeran and co-writers John McDaid and Steven McCutcheon were accused of ripping off Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue’s 2015 song Oh Why (Aaron Chown/PA)

(Picture: PA Wire)

The big guy beat the little guy in the copyright battle around Ed Sheeran’s Shape of You, but this is an occasion when it would be unwise to root for the underdog.

Mr Justice Zacaroli’s verdict on whether Sheeran and his co-writers, Steve McCutcheon and Johnny McDaid, had copied the “Oh I oh I oh I” segment of the hit song from Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue’s lesser known 2015 single Oh Why, noted that there are "similarities between the one-bar phrase" of the two songs but that Sheeran had "neither deliberately nor subconsciously copied" Oh Why.