Sam Smith, Normani ‘Dancing With a Stranger’ Copyright Lawsuit Revived

The copyright infringement lawsuit claiming that Sam Smith and Normani‘s 2018 hit single “Dancing With a Stranger” stole from a 2015 song of the same name has been revived by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit. In 2023, a California federal judge dismissed the case, stating that “most if not all of the Plaintiff’s claimed similarities” relied on musical building blocks that belong to the public domain and could not be protected by law. The federal appeals court has reversed the ruling, stating that a “reasonable jury” should decide the matter instead.

The case will be returned to Judge Wesley L. Hsu, who made the decision to dismiss the suit filed in 2022 by songwriters Jordan Vincent, Christopher Miranda, and Rosco Banlaoi under the name Sound and Color, LLC. The writers claimed that “Dancing With a Stranger” was substantially similar to the title, chorus, and composition of their original and protected song. The appeal will focus particularly on the hook of the song. Hsu previously believed “that Sound and Color could not satisfy the extrinsic test as a matter of law and therefore granted summary judgment,” the filing reads. The appeal supports the notion that an extrinsic test wouldn’t be the only way to assess the similarity between the songs.

“But here, Sound and Color asserts a selection-and-arrangement theory of infringement,” it continues. “Under that theory, copyright protection is extended to ‘a combination of unprotectable elements . . . only if those elements are numerous enough and their selection and arrangement original enough that their combination constitutes an original work of authorship’ … Because a selection-and-arrangement theory is an alternative to filtering used to assess works that cannot as easily ‘be dissected into protected and unprotected elements,’ our analysis does not filter out the musical elements that would be individually unprotectable.”

In September 2022, lawyers for Smith and Normani asked a judge to reject the bulk of an amended copyright infringement lawsuit filed by Sound and Color. Their previous motion to dismiss referenced other songs with similar titles, including Cyndi Lauper’s 1989 “Dancing With a Stranger” and The Risk’s 2019 “Dancing with a Stranger.” As the appeal focuses more specifically on the hook, the suit enters more contentious territory.

In 2023, Ed Sheeran won a copyright infringement lawsuit claiming he lifted elements from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” for his hit “Thinking Out Loud.” Last year, he won the appeal. “Overprotecting such basic elements would threaten to stifle creativity and undermine the purpose of copyright law,” a panel of appeals court judges wrote at the time.