Edward Christopher Sheeran, MBE (born 17 February 1991) is an English singer-songwriter. In early 2011, Sheeran independently released the extended play, No. 5 Collaborations Project. After signing with Asylum Records, his debut album, + (pronounced "plus"), was released in September 2011. It topped the UK and Australian charts, reached number five in the US, and has since been certified eight-times platinum in the UK.
The album contains the single "The A Team", which earned him the Ivor Novello Award for Best Song Musically and Lyrically. In 2012, Sheeran won the Brit Awards for Best British Male Solo Artist and British Breakthrough Act. "The A Team" was nominated for Song of the Year at the 2013 Grammy Awards, where he performed the song with Elton John.
Ed Sheeran Attorney on Court Victory: ‘He Feels Vindicated Not Only for Himself, but All Songwriters’
variety.comChris Willman Senior Music Writer and Chief Music Critic To say that the music industry was glued to reports coming out of the Ed Sheeran copyright infringement trial, and particularly the verdict, would be an understatement, coming as it did after the “Blurred Lines” case had a very different outcome.
Ilene Farkas, the lead attorney from Pryor Cashman, which handled Sheeran’s defense, says the two trials weren’t exactly comparable, but knew well that many songwriters who worry they could end up in the same shoes as Sheeran were counting on a victory for the singer-songwriter to establish some fresh precedent for having future copyright claims facing a higher burden of proof.
Farkas spoke with Variety the day after the verdict came in favoring Sheeran over the plantiffs, heirs of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” co-writer, Ed Townsend. After seven or eight years of this moving its way slowly through the legal system, were you always perceiving this as a grand slam when the time finally came, or was there more unease about it than that, given that many people who would be on your side in this one think juries have gotten it wrong in the past? When you really look at what’s actually at issue in this case, we were talking about chord progressions and the anticipation of the chord progressions.
And to the extent that their changing theories included pitches or melodies here and there, we were always confident that if you applied those facts to copyright law, that we should absolutely prevail.
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