Ed Sheeran Wins Copyright Case — So He Won’t Be Quitting Music After All

Ed Sheeran has been found not liable for copyright infringement for “Thinking Out Loud” after Structured Asset Sale claimed Sheeran stole key elements from Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” for his 2014 Grammy-winning song. After a two-week trial, a jury determined on May 4 that Sheeran did not violate the song’s copyright protection and that he wrote the song with collaborator Amy Wadge independent of Gaye’s 1973 tune.

“I feel like the truth was heard and the truth was believed,” Sheeran, 32, told PEOPLE after the verdict was announced. “It’s nice that we can both move on with our lives now — it’s sad that it had to come to this.” Sheeran said days earlier that if he didn’t win the court case, he would quit music. “If that happens, I’m done, I’m stopping,” Sheeran said in court when asked if the decision wasn’t in his favor. “I find it to be really insulting. I work really hard to be where I’m at.”

Structured Asset Sale, who owns a third of the shares of the song from Ed Townsend, who co-wrote “Let’s Get It On” with Gaye, filed the case in 2017 alleging that Sheeran took parts directly from the 1970s hit. The court case focused on how certain chord progressions and elements of popular music could be owned by one artist or entity, or free for anyone else to use. This has been a tricky concept to navigate in the past few years. Artists such as Taylor Swift, Katy Perry, and Robin Thicke and Pharrell have faced similar allegations.

One argument in favor of Structured Asset Sale was that Sheeran performed a mashup of both songs during a 2014 show in Zurich, considering it “the smoking gun” of the case. “I mash up songs at lots of gigs. Many songs have similar chords. You can go from ‘Let It Be’ to ‘No Woman No Cry’ and switch back,” Sheeran said in court. ‘And quite frankly, if I’d done what you’re accusing me of doing, I’d be quite an idiot to stand on a stage in front of 20,000 people and do that.”

“When you write songs, somebody comes after you,” Sheeran explained during his testimony. The trial even featured Sheeran performing “Thinking Out Loud” in the courtroom for jurors.

In 2022, Sheeran was involved in another copyright infringement case for his song “Shape Of You.” Sami Chokri and Ross O’Donoghue accused Sheeran of copying their 2015 song “Oh Why.” It was ultimately ruled that Sheeran “neither deliberately nor subconsciously copied” the song.

“There’s only so many notes and very few chords used in pop music,” Sheeran said in an Instagram video following the 2022 case’s victory. “Coincidence is bound to happen if 60,000 are being released every day on Spotify.”