Ed Sheeran’s Thinking Out Loud lawsuit drama may finally be coming to an end after years of court cases since the bop was released 11 years ago.
The soft rock hit Thinking Out Loud from Sheeran’s second studio album X was released in 2014.
If you think you haven’t heard it, you’re wrong. The song has a stronghold at every wedding to take place in Britain, Ireland, and the US, since its release and was on every mainstream radio station at least once a day for two years after its launch.
The song was such a massive success that when music journalists compared it to Marvin Gaye’s Let’s Get It On, copyright lawsuits came in guns blazing.
In the latest update on June 16, the Supreme Court announced that it would not be taking on a copyright case, which accused Sheeran’s song of infringing upon Gaye’s copyright.
The court did not detail why they decided not to take the case, but it could have something to do with the numerous outcomes in other lower courts that Sheeran has won.
The first suit levelled at Sheeran was in 2016 when the daughter of Ed Townsend, the man who co-wrote the Gaye song in 1973.
The case ended in 2017 with Sheeran being cleared and avoiding millions in possible copyright fees, avoiding the fate of Pharrell and Robin Thicke, who paid a hefty fine after their Blurred Lines track was deemed too similar to Gaye’s Got To Give It Up.
The second lawsuit came in 2018 from Structured Asset Sales (SAS), which is estimated to have an 11% ownership stake in Gaye’s music. The case was heard in 2023 and resulted in Sheeran winning the case again.
Speaking outside the court in 2023, Sheeran commented: ‘We spent the past eight years talking about two songs with dramatically different lyrics, melodies and four chords which are also different and used by songwriters every day all over the world.’
He added: ‘These chords are common building blocks which were used to create music long before “Let’s Get It On” was written and will be used to make music long after we are all gone.
‘They are in a songwriter’s alphabet, our toolkit, and should be there for all of us to use. No one owns them or the way they are played, in the same way nobody owns the colour blue.’
The 2023 victory was, of course, appealed, but led to this Supreme Court dismissal in June 2025.
In a fun twist to the relentless story, a separate case SAS may now go to the federal court.
In a statement to Billboard, SAS owner and industry executive David Pullman said that the separate case ‘will now go forward’.
‘Defendants’ fear has always been the sound recording of “Let’s Get It On”,’ Pullman said. ‘The U.S. Supreme Court was aware of this and understands that the case will go forward and may very well be back at the U.S. Supreme Court at a later date.’
However, the idea of yet another case has been firmly rejected by Sheeran’s lawyer.
Sheeran’s attorney, Donald Zakarin, has dismissed the suggestion that the case can be revived and emphasised that Sheeran and his co-writer Amy Wadge, created the song independently.
‘Pullman’s completely unauthorised and improper purported registration of the Marvin Gaye recording of “Let’s Get It On,” 50 years after it was created, will not change that fact,’ Zakarin told Billboard.
‘If he truly believed that the second case he filed was so compelling – which it is not – he would not have spent the last two years pursuing his failed first case.’
Amy Wadge, who co-wrote the song, has spoken about her relief at the decade-long back-and-forth finally, seemingly, coming to an end.
‘Ten long years it has been, so to get that ruling is an incredible relief,’ she told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. ‘It has just rolled on, but yes, it’s done.’
The singer was open about how the financial loss of a negative outcome could have ruined her.
‘The absolute truth is that song changed my life. I didn’t have a hit until I was 37. Then I was able to feel like I’d had a hit for a year and then all of a sudden it felt like the walls were surrounding.
‘It was incredibly frightening. Had we lost that case, I could have effectively lost everything.
‘I just knew that had they been successful, it really would have caused a huge issue for creativity in general.’
The music video of Thinking Out Loud was released a decade ago and as of February 2025, has garnered 3.8 billion streams on YouTube.
The song was the first to ever spend an entire year in the UK Top 40 and is one of the most-streamed songs on Spotify.
Despite its incredible success, it is actually Sheeran’s second most successful song ever, behind the 2017 hit Shape of You.
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