A federal judge has refused to throw out the copyright lawsuit over Sam Smith and Normani‘s 2019 single Dancing with a Stranger.
Judge Wesley L. Hsu denied the defendants’ motion for summary judgment in an order filed on Tuesday (September 22) in the US District Court for the Central District of California.
The decision points the case toward a jury trial, four and a half years after it was filed by Sound and Color, LLC.
Sound and Color is owned by songwriter Jordan Vincent and the production duo SKX, made up of Christopher Miranda and Rosco Banlaoi.
Vincent, Miranda, and Banlaoi wrote a song titled Dancing with a Stranger, also known as Dancing with Strangers, in February or March 2015, according to facts agreed by both sides and set out in the order.
Smith, James Napier, Tor Erik Hermansen, and Mikkel Eriksen wrote the later song of the same name on August 7, 2018, and it was released with its music video in January 2019.
Normani, sued under her full name Normani Kordei Hamilton, sang on the released recording but did not take part in writing the song, the order states.
Other defendants include UMG Recordings, Sony Music Publishing (US), Sony Corporation of America, EMI Blackwood Music, EMI April Music, 45th and 3rd Music, Tim & Danny Music, and Downtown Music Publishing.
The defendants asked the court to end the case in July, arguing that no reasonable jury could find the two hooks strikingly similar, and that the older song’s hook is not protected because it rests on unlicensed samples.
Hsu rejected both arguments.
The order criticizes the way the defendants broke the two songs down element by element, comparing pitch sequences, then rhythm, then metric placement, then contour.
“Disassemble any two works enough and neither would resemble anything,” Hsu wrote, declining the defendants’ invitation and instead viewing the works, in the Ninth Circuit‘s phrase, “as the sum of all the relevant elements together.”
In a stipulation filed in May, Sound and Color withdrew every argument that Smith and their co-writers could have had access to the earlier track, including a claim built on similarities between the two music videos, leaving it to argue that the songs are so alike that copying is the only plausible explanation.
The order finds that the plaintiff’s musicologist, Dr. Alexander Stewart, did enough to put that question in front of a jury.
“Plaintiff’s experts do more than simply trade adjectives with Defendants’,” Hsu wrote.
Stewart “listed the elements of the two songs that he compared, identified where the works diverge rather than hiding the divergence, supplied a musicological justification explaining why the divergence carried little weight, and tied his conclusion to the combination of elements rather than to any one of them,” according to the order.
The defendants had argued that Stewart‘s opinion was conclusory, in part because he said independent creation was “highly unlikely” rather than impossible.
Hsu noted that the Ninth Circuit has itself used that phrase in assessing striking similarity, adding that the defendants “inexplicably fault him for it.”
The judge refused to exclude the plaintiff’s second expert, recording engineer Brian Bricklin, but declined to rely on his evidence, finding his side-by-side listening too subjective for the objective test the court had to apply – and held that Stewart alone was enough to send the question to a jury.
On independent creation, the order says the defendants’ evidence has to be weighed against the plaintiff’s case rather than substituted for it.
“[T]he Court finds the question of independent creation should be left for the jury to decide,” Hsu wrote.
The judge also refused to strip the earlier song of copyright protection over its two unlicensed samples – a full-measure vocal part from The Ha Dance by Masters At Work, and a two-measure portion of Think (About It) by Lyn Collins.
The defendants failed to show that what was taken was substantial in relation to those two songs, the order says.
Hsu added that he had listened to the recordings himself, and that the samples are “both difficult to identify or even hear” inside the plaintiff’s song because of their low volume.
A reasonable jury could therefore find the samples de minimis, according to the order.
Hsu granted the defendants summary judgment in September 2023, on the ground that the two songs failed the objective test for substantial similarity, before the Ninth Circuit reversed in April 2025. The case returned to Hsu that June, with liability discovery split off from damages.
It is one of several musical-similarity disputes now moving through the US courts, among them a suit filed in the same California court in July against NewJeans, HYBE, and ADOR over the 2023 track ETA.
It also cuts against a run of defense wins, including Ed Sheeran‘s victory over the claim brought against Thinking Out Loud by rights firm Structured Asset Sales, which ended when the US Supreme Court declined to revive the claim against him in 2025.Music Business Worldwide
