The courts have awarded Mariah Carey $92,000 after a judge dismissed a lawsuit regarding her festive hit 'All I Want For Christmas Is You'.
This comes after singer Andy Stone had filed a lawsuit against Carey in November 2023. Filing this lawsuit at a federal court in Los Angeles, Stone whose stage name is Vince Vance, claimed that Carey's track breached the copyright of his 1989 song of the same name, alleging that the singer exploited his "popularity" and "style".
At the time, Mr Stone's lawyer Douglas M. Schmidt released this statement: “If you look at both songs, you can see that about 50 per cent of the words are the same, in almost the same order. I think it’s a pretty strong claim".
Mr Stone was seeking $20 million (£16 million) in damages.
But earlier this year, the courts ruled that Stone's legal team had not "met their burden of showing" that the two songs were "substantially similar".
Judge Monica Ramirez Almadini had said Mr Stone's legal team should face sanctions for sharing what she described as frivolous” arguments, including “vague…and incomprehensible mixtures of factual assertions and conclusions, subjective opinions and other irrelevant evidence”.
The judge said that she was "inclined" to throw the case out, after Carey's legal team called for it to be dropped as the claims had failed the court's “extrinsic test for substantial similarity in protectable expression”.
Now, court documents have said that Andy Stone has been ordered by the courts to pay Mariah Carey $92,303.20 (£68,294.33) in sanctions, saying that the lawsuit had lacked merit, adding that the sanctions were intended to deter similarly baseless lawsuits.
Just before Christmas, Mariah Carey also offered her reaction to the news that 'All I Want For Christmas Is You' had broken the record for the longest running track in the US.
The song hit a record breaking 20th week at the summit of the Billboard Hot 100, despite being released over three decades ago. It has surpassed the joint number one runs of the previous two hits, Lil Nas X’s ‘Old Town Road’ (featuring Billy Ray Cyrus) in 2019, and Shaboozey’s ‘A Bar Song (Tipsy)’ from last year.
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