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Vince Vance, whose official name is Andy Stone, is suing Carey, Sony Music Entertainment, and co-writer of the Christmas song, Walter Afanasieff, for copyright infringement in a lawsuit filed in federal court in Louisiana on Friday.
According to the lawsuit received by USA TODAY, Stone and Vince Vance of the pop country group The Valiants co-wrote a song with the same title in 1989. Stone’s “All I Want For Christmas” was published a few years before Carey’s breakthrough, but the lyrics and melody are different.
The songs all have the same title and are about modestly requesting their significant other for the holidays. Song titles alone are not protected by copyright law, according to the United States Copyright Office, “because they contain an insufficient amount of authorship.”
Andy Stone claims that Carey’s song ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ has ruined his career and is filing a lawsuit for at least $20 million.
According to copyright documents, Stone has a copyright certificate for the song, which he got in 1988. Many more songs with the same title have copyright certificates after the late 1980s, according to the copyright library. However, according to Vance, the defendants never sought permission to utilize it in the advertising and distribution of their 1994 Billboard chart-topper.
The complaint reads, “Defendants, have knowingly, wilfully, and intentionally engaged in a campaign to infringe Plaintiff’s copyright in the work.”
Stone’s counsel approached Carey and her staff about the infringement claim in April 2021, according to the lawsuit, and issued a follow-up letter in December. The complaint said, “Even after communicating the concerns with Defendants, Plaintiff was unable to come to any agreement over usage of the ‘All I Want for Christmas is You.’ “
Carey’s song broke Billboard chart history when it reached No. 1 for the third year in a row on Billboard’s Hot 100 chart, breaking a tie with Chubby Checker’s 1960 dance smash “The Twist,” which reached No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 1960 and 1962.
Carey told USA TODAY at the time, “I wanted it to feel like a classic, but I didn’t know that it was going to actually become a classic. I say that humbly because Christmas music is something that’s really special to me.”
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