Mariah Carey‘s holiday earworm “All I Want For Christmas is You” is at the center of a lawsuit. According to TMZ, Andy Stone is suing for copyright infringement. He claims he co-wrote a song of the same name, and released it a few years before Mariah Carey’s came out.
It’s a frivolous lawsuit, to say the least. You can’t sue for using the same song title. Often times song titles are similar, or even exactly the same. You wouldn’t easily mistake one song for the other in this case either since they sound entirely different.
Take for example, song title “Jump,” which has been used multiple times. The Pointer Sisters, Van Halen, and the group Kris Kross all use the same title in a song. Stone is claiming Carey and her team never asked for permission for that song.
Why should they have? Stone is seeking $20 million for copyright infringement and for damages. Siting hers ‘pops up better’ when searching online. Pretty sure when Mariah Carey’s “All I Want For Christmas Is You” came out, search engine optimization wasn’t a thing. So the fact that hers remains the primary result when searching the title is due to the massive amount of popularity it’s had over the years.
While this suit has been filed, don’t expect a whole lot to come from it. It doesn’t even make sense. If Stone had wanted to sue, it would have made much more sense to do it when the song first came out. Not almost thirty years later.