Here’s when holiday songs are courted

Holiday music is big business. It is also a major source of litigation.

When Mariah Carey‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ stormed back to the top of the Hot 100 this month, it wasn’t alone. Each of the current top five songs are holiday numbers, with Brenda Lee‘Rockin’ Around The Christmas Tree’ in second and Wham!’s ‘Last Christmas’ in fourth.

All of these streams bring in some serious royalty money. Lee’s perennial classic earned nearly $4 million in 2022, and even smaller songs like “The Chipmunk Song (Christmas Don’t Be Late)” typically earn hundreds of thousands a year. In 2018, Billboard estimated that the entire Christmas music genre grossed $177 million in the US market alone – a total that has almost certainly grown in the years since.

And where popularity and money go, lawsuits usually follow. As veteran music industry lawyers are fond of saying, “Where there’s a hit, there’s a summons”

With the holidays just around the corner, Billboard breaks down the many times Christmas music has ended up in court—from Mariah’s ongoing copyright battle over “All I Want For Christmas Is You” to Darlene Love’s battles with advertisers to repeated courtroom clashes over religious freedom. Here are the five big things you need to know:

‘All I Want For Christmas Is’ … A copyright case

Carey’s 1994 blockbuster is THE modern holiday song — which has now reclaimed the top spot on the Hot 100 for six straight years and is set to earn a whopping $8.5 million in global revenue by 2022. So it’s no surprise that she’s facing a lawsuit seeking to have it removed. cash.

As of 2022, Carey has faced allegations of copyright infringement from the songwriter named Vince Vancewho claims she stole key elements of “All I Want for Christmas is You” from his 1989 song of the same name. He claims the earlier track, released by his Vince Vance and the Valiants, received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now better-known hit.

“Carey has … palmed these works with her incredulous origin story as if these works were her own,” Vance wrote in her latest complaint. “Her hubris knows no bounds, even her co-credited songwriter doesn’t believe the story she’s spun.”

Not surprisingly, Carey’s lawyers see things differently. In a motion filed earlier this year to end the case, her legal team argued that the two songs shared only generic similarities that are firmly in the public domain — including basic Christmas terminology and a simple message that has been used in “legions of carols.”

“The alleged similarities are an unprotected jumble of elements: a title and hook phrase used by many past Christmas carols, other common words, phrases and Christmas tropes such as ‘Santa Claus’ and ‘mistletoe’, and a few unprotected pitches and chords randomly scattered throughout these entirely different songs,” Carey’s lawyers wrote at the time.

Now that Christmas is approaching, it looks like Vance might be getting a lump of coal in his stocking: At a hearing last month, the judge overseeing the trial said she was likely to side with Carey and dismiss the case.

Good Grief: ‘Charlie Brown Christmas’ Sues Dollywood

Less than two months before Peanuts television producer Lee Mendelson died in 2019, sued his production company Dolly Parton‘s Dollywood theme park – accusing the park of using the music from his “A Charlie Brown Christmas” without permission.

Songs by jazz pianist Vince Guaraldi‘s legendary soundtrack to the 1965 TV special, including classic originals as well as updated standards like “O Tannenbaum,” is firmly in the Christmas canon—and none more so than “Christmas Time Is Here,” which Guaraldi co-wrote with Mendelson.

In a lawsuit filed in federal court, Lee Mendelson accused Film Productions Inc. Dollywood for using that song for decades in Christmas-themed theatrical productions without proper licenses, calling it “willful copyright infringement” and “flagrant disregard” of the law.

As is often the case in such lawsuits, Dollywood had secured a general license from BMI to publicly play millions of songs for his guests, but would have needed a separately negotiated “dramatic license” to use it in a stage play: “Defendant knew from the outset of its infringement that its performance license from BMI does not cover ‘major’ or ‘dramatic’ rights,” the company wrote.

With a trial set to begin in December 2021, both sides agreed to a confidential settlement that summer to resolve the case.

Concert clash: Jubilation or state religion?

Do public school Christmas concerts violate the US Constitution’s separation of church and state? It’s an issue that’s been fought in court many times — and when a federal appeals judge weighed in in 2015, she didn’t miss an opportunity to sprinkle holiday references into her opinion.

For decades, Concord High School in Elkhart, Indiana held an annual winter concert centered on an “elaborate, student-performed nativity scene,” featuring religious songs (including “Jesus, Jesus, Rest Your Head”) along with a narrator reading passages from the New Testament .

Not surprisingly, after students and parents sued in 2014, a federal district court ruled that such an overtly Christian show violated the First Amendment and its ban on establishing a state religion. But when the school later made significant changes — removing the Bible readings and adding songs representing Hanukkah and Kwanzaa, among other things — both the district judge and an appeals court said the new version of the show was constitutional.

IN her statement of complaint from 2018, Judge Diane Wood waxed poetic—says that “since ancient times, people have celebrated the winter solstice” and that the Concord High case put the court “in the uncomfortable role of the Grinch.”

“However, we accept this position because we live in a society where all religions are welcome,” Judge Wood wrote. “The Christmas Spectacular program Concord actually presented in 2015 — a program that emphasized cultural, educational and entertainment value — did not violate the Establishment Clause.”

Baby Please: Darlene Love sues over her voice

Before Mariah was the “Queen of Christmas,” that title was sometimes used for Darlene Love — and the original queen hasn’t been afraid to enforce her rights to her iconic holiday numbers “A Marshmallow World” and “Christmas (Baby Please Come Home).”

Back in 2016, Love’s lawyers filed a lawsuit against Google over allegations that the tech giant used “Marshmallow” without permission in advertisements for its Nexus smartphones. A few months later, she filed an almost identical lawsuit against the cable network HGTV, accusing the channel of using “Come Home” in a different set of ads.

That might sound like copyright cases, but they weren’t. Instead, Love accused the companies of violating her so-called right of publicity by using her voice in the commercials, claiming that her voice was so well-known that the use of the songs falsely implied that she had endorsed those products.

“Defendant’s actions were heinous and in willful disregard of Law’s rights,” her attorneys wrote at the time. “The defendant made her an involuntary pitchman for programs of questionable quality. Defendants created several advertisements that falsely suggested to the public that Love had endorsed HGTV’s programming.”

If successful, the cases could have raised difficult issues for advertisers who want to feature popular songs in their commercials – potentially requiring them to both clear copyright to the music and obtain explicit permission from well-known artists. But the lawsuit never got far: Love dropped his lawsuits later that year.

‘Christmas in Dixie’ royalty match in Australia

When a singer-songwriter named Allan Caswell filed a lawsuit alleging that the country band Alabama had stolen key elements of their 1982 country hit “Christmas in Dixie” from his earlier song “On The Inside,” the case came with a twist: He wasn’t actually suing the band itself.

Instead, he filed suit against his own music publisher, Sony ATV Music Publishing Australia, for failing to collect royalties from the allegedly copied song. According to a retrial filed in 2012, the publisher’s musicologist concluded years earlier that the two tracks “shared a level of similarity” that went beyond a “random occurrence of pure coincidence.”

But why sue Sony and not Alabama? According to Caswell, it was that the American band were also signed to another unit of Sony – and he claimed his publisher refused to act as a result.

“That’s the problem,” Caswell told a local television station in Australia. “I’m signed to Sony ATV. Alabama is signed to Sony Music. So it’s all in-house. There’s no incentive for them to act. They basically can’t step in because they’d sue themselves.”

In 2014, an Australian judge dismissed claims by Caswell, ruling there was no evidence Alabama frontman Teddy Gentry had ever heard “On The Inside” before writing his Christmas number. “I am satisfied that it is unlikely that he could have heard the plaintiff’s song by picking it up from the theme music to episodes of Prisoner,” said the judge at the time.

Jailhouse Rockin’ Around the Christmas Tree

If you were subjected to “constant” holiday songs for 10 hours straight every single day while serving a prison sentence, you might want to file a lawsuit too.

That was the name of an inmate in Arizona William Lamb did in 2009 and charged the Maricopa County Sheriff Joseph Arpaio (yes, to Joe Arpaio) for violating his constitutional rights with a non-stop list of Christmas carols at a Tucson correctional facility.

According to Lamb, the prison switched out regular television programs in favor of “constant Christmas music” played in the facility “continuously and repeatedly” from 9 a.m. to 7 p.m. The playlist included secular numbers such as Elmo & Patsy’s “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer” and The Chipmunks, but also the Tabernacle Choir singing traditional carols.

In his lawsuit, Lamb claimed that the holiday music marathon “forced him to participate in and observe a religious holiday without being given a choice,” violating the First Amendment. Arpaio argued back that the music served a secular purpose intended to “reduce inmate tensions and promote safety in the prisons” during a “difficult time of year for inmates.”

In a ruling just a week before Christmas in 2009, a federal judge agreed – to say that the music served a valid non-religious purpose and did not primarily push religion on the inmates.

“Although Plaintiff alleges in his complaint that the purpose of the music was to compel him to participate in a religious holiday, he does not explain how playing the music had a primary effect of promoting religion,” the judge wrote in the ruling. “To be sure, some of the music was religious, but the Supreme Court held (in previous cases) that some promotion of religion gives rise to a violation of the Establishment Clause. A remote or incidental benefit to religion is not enough.”

Music business year in review