ED SHEERAN WINS SHAPE OF YOU COPYRIGHT CASE

Ed Sheeran has won a High Court copyright battle over his 2017 hit, Shape of You.

A judge ruled today that the singer-songwriter had not plagiarised the 2015 song Oh Why by Sami Chokri.

Chokri, a grime artist who performs under the name Sami Switch, had claimed the “Oh I” hook in Sheeran’s track was “strikingly similar” to an “Oh why” refrain in his own track but Sheeran said he did not remember hearing Oh Why before the legal case.

Judge Antony Zacaroli however, ruled that Sheeran had “neither deliberately nor subconsciously copied” Chokri’s song.

Zacaroli, despite acknowledging that there were “similarities between the one-bar phrase” in Shape of You and Oh Why, said “such similarities are only a starting point for a possible infringement” of copyright.