What do you get the Queen of Christmas who has everything? Probably just more money generated by her hit holiday song.
Since Mariah Carey first belted “I don’t want a lot for Christmas,” she’s hauled in over $100 million in royalties over the 31 years since its release. This year, she gets to add even more jolly dollar bills than usual to the pile, after being gifted attorney’s fees in a dismissed copyright lawsuit over the song behind the second saddest moment in Love Actually. (The saddest being Joni Mitchell‘s “Both Sides Now,” obviously.)
In November 2023, Andy Stone (who performs as Vince Vance) and Troy Powers sued Carey for “a very confident” $20 million, claiming her version plagiarized their 1989 country-ish Christmas kind-of-hit song—performed under the name Vince Vance & the Valiants and also titled, “All I Want for Christmas Is You.” The lawsuit alleged that Carey’s song copied the “compositional structure of an extended comparison between a loved one and trappings of seasonal luxury, and further includes several of Plaintiffs’ lyrical phrases.” Pretty typical of a holiday song, no?
You might recognize the song, but it’s as different from Carey’s version as “Jingle Bells” is from “Jingle Bells Rock”: they both talk about longing for someone for Christmas and have “Christmas” in the title. And I know this isn’t how copyright infringement is determined, but Vance’s version is more jazz-y and melancholy, while Carey’s is just pure pop fun. As Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg tells the Winklevoss twins in The Social Network: “If you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you’d have invented Facebook.”
But that lawsuit was officially dismissed in March. This week, new court documents show the judge found the lawsuit “lacked merit” and “determined there was good reason to deter people from filing baseless lawsuits,” thereby awarding Carey $92,300 in sanctions—to be paid for by Vance’s attorney. An additional $20,000 was awarded to a few others who were involved on Carey’s side.
Stone first filed a copyright lawsuit against Carey in 2022, but that was quickly thrown out, and then Stone filed it again with Powers the following year. When the first suit was dismissed, the BBC pointed out that the U.S. Copyright Office has 177 registered songs titled “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” many of which were released before the 1989 version. All Christmas songs are all Christmas songs are all Christmas songs.
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