Ed Sheeran now films “every single writing session” to prevent future copyright cases

nme.com:

Ed Sheeran has said that he now films “every single writing session” to prevent future copyright cases into his songs.Sheeran recently won a copyright case at the High Court over claims that he plagiarised hit song ‘Shape Of You’ from two other writers.Sheeran along with two of his co-writers – Snow Patrol’s Johnny McDaid and producer Steve McCutcheon – were accused of plagiarising part of a track called ‘Oh Why’ by Sami Chokri, who performs under the alias Sami Switch.Sheeran and his co-authors, denied all allegations of copying, claiming that they don’t remember hearing ‘Oh Why’ before the claims were lodged.

After an 11-day trial, Justice Zacaroli ruled on April 6 that Sheeran “neither deliberately nor subconsciously” copied a phrase from ‘Oh Why’ when writing ‘Shape Of You.’Previously, Sheeran settled a $20million (£15million) copyright case over his single ‘Photograph’ in 2017.

Now, Sheeran and McDaid have now spoken to BBC2’s Newsnight about the cases with Sheeran saying that since the ‘Photograph’ settlement, he now records all songwriting sessions."I didn't play Photograph for ages after that… I felt weird about it, it kind of made me feel dirty."Ed Sheeran tells #Newsnight he regrets settling a previous multi-million pound copyright dispute as it opened the floodgates to other claimshttps://t.co/MNvpv3ejzY pic.twitter.com/dxwjurfHfn— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) April 8, 2022He told the programme that “I just film everything” to prevent a similar case ever being brought in the future.He explained: “We’ve had claims come through on songs and we go, ‘Well here’s the footage and you watch, and you’ll see that there’s nothing there’.”Speaking about how his songwriting had changed as a result, he said: “I personally.