The band who produced the 2008 song The Man Who Can’t Be Moved, ‘The Script’, are suing James Arthur for copyright infringement in his 2016 song Say You Won’t Let Go. They seek financial compensation for the touring and streaming revenue connected to the song.
The Scripts reasoning is because they believe Say You Won’t Let Go contains extremely similar melodies and almost identical beats to their The Man Who Can’t Be Moved even going as far as to hire a musicologist to produce a report on the two songs. In response the singer, who re-signed to Syco after previously being dropped following a number of inappropriate tweets in 2014, says that The Script have “no case” as “[in] 2017, there’s only seven notes in music.”
As well as the similarity in the songs, the lawsuit also claims that James Arthur approached Danny O’Donoghue, frontman of The Script asking whether he wanted to collaborate on a song. This request was turned down.
Say You Won’t Let Go has had more than 600 million views on YouTube and was the singers first song James Arthur released following his resigning to Syco. It was number one in the UK for three weeks in 2016.
Both links to the songs are included below:
The Man Who Can’t Be Moved – https://youtu.be/gS9o1FAszdk
Say You Won’t Let Go – https://youtu.be/0yW7w8F2TVA
