Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke and TI launch appeal against Blurred Lines verdict

Thought the Blurred Lines saga had been settled? Think again. Pharrell Williams, Robin Thicke and TI have launched an appeal against the verdict that saw them ordered to pay $5.3m and 50% of songwriting and publishing revenues to the family of Marvin Gaye, after a jury ruled last year that the song copied Gaye’s 1977 hit Got to Give It Up.

Lawyers for the trio filed their opening brief with the ninth circuit court of appeals on 24 August, arguing that “if left to stand, the Blurred Lines verdict would chill musical creativity and inhibit the process by which later artists draw inspiration from earlier artists to create new popular music”.

The appeal is based on the assertion that the judge in the original case, John Kronstadt, misread the law by allowing comparison of the recordings of the two songs, rather than just the sheet music. Williams, Thicke and TI claim – or their lawyers do, at any rate – that Got to Give It Up was one of the last songs recorded before a change to copyright law to include sound recordings. Had Kronstadt, they say, simply considered the sheet music – the “deposit copy” filed with the the US copyright office – then the case would not have gone to trial.

“What happened instead was a cascade of legal errors warranting this court’s reversal or vacatur for new trial,” the opening brief states. “At summary judgment, the district court entertained expert testimony by musicologists for the Gayes who based their opinions entirely on the sound recording, not the deposit copy. The court correctly filtered out non-deposit copy and generic musical features from their testimony, but then erroneously failed to compare what remained to Blurred Lines.

“At trial, the district court made things worse. While correctly excluding the Got to Give It Up sound recording itself, the court erroneously allowed the Gayes’ experts to testify about the sound recording anyway, including by playing their own musical excerpts based on the sound recording. The court then instructed the jury that it could consider all this testimony in its substantial-similarity analysis.”

They cite the recent verdict in the Stairway to Heaven case – where Led Zeppelin were found not to have plagiarised from Spirit’s Taurus – as a precedent for discounting “specific musical elements” that might be similar when assessing whether a song as a whole has breached a copyright.