Mariah Carey won sanctions against a Christmas-song plaintiff, and Dua Lipa beat 'Levitating': 2025's failed plagiarism suits

Two huge hits survived copyright suits eight days apart. On 19 March 2025, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani in Los Angeles granted summary judgment to Mariah Carey and her co-defendants over "All I Want for Christmas Is You", and granted their motion for sanctions. On 27 March, Judge Katherine Polk Failla in Manhattan granted summary judgment to Dua Lipa and her co-writers, publishers and label over "Levitating".

The cases were different, but the reasoning ran the same way. Neither ruling turned on whether anyone had heard the older song. Both turned on the fact that what the plaintiffs pointed to wasn't theirs to own.

What did the Carey plaintiffs claim, and why did it fail?

Andy Stone, who performs as Vince Vance, and Troy Powers sued in November 2023. They said they co-wrote a song called "All I Want for Christmas Is You" in 1988, released it in 1989, and that Carey and Walter Afanasieff copied its lyrics, structure, chords, melody and harmony for their 1994 song, according to the order. Reports put the damages sought at $20 million.

Both sides agreed to decide one question first: whether the songs were substantially similar in protected expression under the Ninth Circuit's "extrinsic test". The defence experts did the filtering that test requires. Musicologist Lawrence Ferrara found that the older song is a slow ballad in 12/8 and Carey's is an up-tempo song in 4/4, and that not a single corresponding note matched in both pitch and rhythmic duration. English professor Nathaniel Lewis listed 12 songs released before 1989 using the title phrase or something close to it.

The plaintiffs' experts didn't filter. The court excluded both reports. One was six paragraphs long and described itself as preliminary. The other conceded that the shared minor chord is known as the "Christmas chord" and that many Christmas songs use similar rhythms, then counted those as similarities anyway. With no admissible expert evidence on the other side, the defence evidence went unrebutted.

Why sanctions, and what did they cost?

The order notes that Rule 11 sanctions are meant for the most egregious situations, and it was specific about why this was one. It found that the plaintiffs' own summary-judgment motion argued issues the court had put on hold, relied on the "inverse ratio rule" that the Ninth Circuit abolished in Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin (the case the motion itself cited), and leaned on factual statements with no evidence behind them. The judge said no single lapse would justify more than a stern reprimand, but that the aggregate was egregious, and put the fault on plaintiffs' counsel.

The amount came later. In December 2025, according to court records reviewed by Rolling Stone and reported by Black Enterprise, the judge awarded $92,300 to Carey out of $109,983 in total, with more than $14,000 going to Sony and smaller sums to Kobalt and Afanasieff. The March order limited the award to the defendants' fees for opposing the plaintiffs' motion and bringing the sanctions motion, not the whole case. Reports differ on who pays: Black Enterprise says the order targets Stone's lawyers, Gerard Fox and Douglas M. Schmidt, while Scripps News says the plaintiffs were ordered to pay. We couldn't open the fee order itself, so we're not settling that here. Black Enterprise also reports that the judge told the two lawyers to explain by 5 January why they shouldn't face discipline, including over their duty to Powers, whom Fox said he no longer had contact with.

What did the "Levitating" plaintiffs claim?

There was more than one "Levitating" suit. Reggae band Artikal Sound System's claim over "Live Your Life" was dismissed in 2023. The March 2025 ruling ended the other: Larball Publishing and Sandy Linzer Productions, who own the 1979 disco song "Wiggle and Giggle All Night" (written by Linzer and L. Russell Brown) and, through an earlier settlement, Miguel Bosé's 1980 "Don Diablo".

This case had got further than Carey's. In August 2023 Failla refused to dismiss it, letting it go to discovery on a theory that the songs were "strikingly similar". By summary judgment, though, the claim came down to five groups of repeated 16th notes walking down a scale, plus one more matching note. Relying on the Second Circuit's November 2024 ruling for Ed Sheeran in Structured Asset Sales v. Sheeran (our explainer), Failla held that a combination of two unprotectable elements isn't enough.

The plaintiffs then argued the phrase was protectable in context: patter singing, the tempo, the harmonies, the place in the verse, and a style they called "pop with a disco feel". The judge noted this theory arrived late, then rejected it anyway. Patter singing goes back to Mozart, Rossini and Gilbert and Sullivan. "Levitating" runs at 103 beats a minute, the same as "Stayin' Alive". And a style and function like disco-pop for dancing can't be owned, she wrote, because that would shut down further development of the genre. She accepted that a listener might hear similarities; that isn't the legal test. The plaintiffs' lawyer said they would appeal.

What we think

Courts on both coasts are now drawing the same line, and drawing it early. These two rulings, built on Skidmore in the Ninth Circuit and Sheeran in the Second, say that genre, tempo, a seasonal title and a scale run are free for everyone, and they said it at summary judgment rather than leaving it to a jury. That's good for working songwriters, who are far more often the person writing in a crowded genre than the person owning a hit.

The warning for would-be plaintiffs is concrete. Both cases were lost on filtering, long before trial. Carey's accusers had their experts thrown out for skipping it; Lipa's accusers had their experts admitted, and lost anyway because what remained after filtering wasn't protectable. If your musicologist can't tell the court which part of your song is original and appears in theirs, after removing everything that also appears in older songs, you don't have a case, and in the Ninth Circuit you may now pay for the attempt. Get that filtered analysis before you file, not after.

There's a cost, and it isn't evenly shared. Rule 11 is meant to deter, and $109,983 is a lot of deterrence for an independent writer up against labels that can pay for a 163-page expert report. The Carey sanctions punished specific failures by counsel, not the act of suing, and artists should read them that way. But they'll chill some honest claims too. The fix is cheaper early musicological screening, through writer organisations and collecting societies, so small writers can learn whether they have a case before they spend money on one.

The same filter will decide the next wave: claims that an AI track "sounds like" an artist. On the standard these judges applied, sounding like a genre or an era won't be enough. Artists worried about AI copying should be collecting evidence of copied melody and lyrics, not mood.

Sources

• US District Court, C.D. Cal., Stone v. Carey, order granting summary judgment and sanctions (19 Mar 2025, via Digital Music News)
• US District Court, S.D.N.Y., Larball Publishing Co. v. Lipa, opinion and order (27 Mar 2025, via Music Business Worldwide)
• Music Business Worldwide, Dua Lipa wins copyright lawsuit over hit song Levitating
• Rolling Stone UK, Dua Lipa wins 'Levitating' copyright case as judge dismisses lawsuit (28 Mar 2025)
• Black Enterprise, Mariah Carey awarded legal fees over copyright lawsuit (26 Dec 2025)
• Scripps News, Mariah Carey awarded over $92K from dismissal of Christmas song case