The lawsuit claiming Sam Smith and Normani’s multi-platinum dance hit “Dancing With A Stranger” stole its hook from a 2015 song by the same name is heading to trial after a federal judge in Los Angeles rejected the musical duo’s latest bid to toss the case. In a 27-page ruling issued Wednesday and obtained by Rolling Stone, U.S. Hsu denied a motion by Smith and Normani that sought to end the case in their favor based on the evidence developed since the case was first filed in March 2022.
The ruling was in keeping with a tentative position he outlined during oral arguments at a hearing on Sept. 11. The long-running lawsuit was filed four years ago, got dismissed the following year, and was later revived on appeal. In July, lawyers for Smith and Normani again asked the court to throw out the case, arguing that experts for the plaintiff songwriters Jordan Vincent, Christopher Miranda, and Rosco Banlao had failed to show the “striking similarity” needed to keep the claims alive.
Disassemble any two works enough, and neither would resemble anything,” he wrote. Hsu said there was no “well-defined standard” for determining when similarities in the selection and arrangement of musical elements become “striking.” But he said the Ninth Circuit, the federal appeals court that oversees California, has made clear that “analyzing each element in isolation is improper.” The judge also found a “dispute of material fact” over the defendants’ claim that the plaintiffs’ 2015 song, “Dancing With a Stranger,” incorporated unauthorized samples from two other copyrighted works and therefore was not entitled to protection. The judge said Smith, Normani, and the other defendants had failed to establish that the plaintiffs’ song was derived from those alleged unauthorized samples.
Meanwhile, the defendants’ claims that they created their 2019 song independently, without any access to the plaintiffs’ song, didn’t matter at this stage of the case, the judge found. Fluehr with the firm Francis Alexander said in a statement to Rolling Stone. Copyright protection, he argued, does not extend to portions of a work that unlawfully incorporate preexisting copyrighted material.
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