Stone v. Carey

2:22-cv-01616 (E.D. La. 2022)

Comment by Charles Cronin

On Nov. 1, 2022 Stone dismissed the claim he filed in federal district court in Louisiana. Perhaps the fact that the dismissal was “without prejudice” — i.e., without establishing that Stone may not reassert his claim in the future — suggests Mariah Carey did not capitulate to demands possibly ventured by plaintiff for a “settlement” from Carey to make him go away.

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Sure enough, Nov. 1, 2023 Plaintiff filed a fresh complaint in federal district court in California (linked below) with the same infringement allegations. What the Plaintiff wants for Christmas appears to be a piece of the “no less than” $20 million damages he suffered from Carey’s purported infringement.

The only significant similarity between the songs is the timeworn conceit of “your presence is your present.” When I was a child, on Christmas, the pastor of our family’s church would recycle a sermon, with a bathetic story involving a soldier returning from WWII, who materialized at his family’s door on Christmas Day wearing a red ribbon around his neck with a card inscribed “From Joe to Mary, Christmas, 1945.” Of course the grotesque sentimentality of the story, along with the shameless recycling of the sermon, generated much mirth within my family. In any event, the underlying sentiment of both songs has been around a very long time.

One infers from the complaint that what really irks the Plaintiff is the fact that Mariah Carey used the same non-protectable idea he had used earlier, resulting in a vastly more economically profitable work. The Plaintiff’s lawyer may realize this is the case because the complaint, woefully lacking in allegations of specific musical similarities between the works, is larded with extraneous verbiage (“linguistic structure”, “a common parlance”) and references to Beyonce Knowles (herself no stranger to groundless infringement claims).

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Complaint, U.S.D.C., Central District California: PDF