Mariah Carey has been sued over an alleged copyright infringement regarding her hit festive track, ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’.
According to Billboard, a second lawsuit has been filed by songwriter Andy Stone who performed under the stage name, Vince Vance.
Mr Stone has claimed that Carey’s 1994 smash hit infringed the copyrights to his 1989 song which he recorded alongside the Valiants. The track reached No.52 in the US singles charts in 1993 after extensive radio coverage.
Carey’s own track reached No1 in 1994 and has since become a Christmas classic.
His latest lawsuit states: “The phrase ‘all I want for Christmas is you’ may seem like a common parlance today, in 1988 it was, in context, distinctive.
“Moreover, the combination of the specific chord progression in the melody paired with the verbatim hook was a greater than 50 per cent clone of Stone’s original work, in both lyric choice and chord expressions.”
Last year, Mr Stone dropped a previous lawsuit where he made similar allegations.
“Carey has without licensing, palmed off these works with her incredulous origin story, as if those works were her own,” Mr Stone’s lawyers wrote in the re-filed complaint.
“Her hubris knowing no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she has spun. This is simply a case of actionable infringement.”
Mr Stone is reportedly being represented by Gerald P Fox, the same attorney who represented two songwriters who accused Taylor Swift of stealing the lyrics to ‘Shake It Off’.
Carey co-wrote the song with Walter Afanasieff who described the process of writing the hit “like a game of ping-pong”.
“I’d hit the ball to her, she hits it back to me. I started playing a boogie-woogie, kind of a rock. Mariah chimed in and started singing ‘I don’t want a lot for Christmas,” he said.
“Then for the next week or two Mariah would call me and say, ‘What do you think about this bit?’ We would talk a little bit until she got the lyrics all nicely coordinated and done.”
Carey has not yet responded to the lawsuit. The Standard has approached her representatives for comment.
