Mariah Carey sued again for copyright infringement over 'All I Want for Christmas Is You'

Reworking a lawsuit he filed last year and then dropped, a songwriter is again alleging Mariah Carey’s perennial hit “All I Want for Christmas Is You” infringes on his own song of that title released in 1989, five years before Carey’s.

In a complaint filed Nov. 1 at the Central District of California federal court, in Los Angeles, Andy Stone aka Vince Vance accuses Carey, her song’s co-writer, Walter Afanasieff, and related corporate entities of direct copyright infringement and unjust enrichment. Stone’s lawsuit last year contained those allegations as well as two others not in the current complaint. Additionally, the 1989 song’s co-writer, Troy Powers, has joined the new suit as a plaintiff.

“Beyond the lyrical hook ‘[a]ll I want for Christmas is you,’ Defendants directly copy and include the exact lyrics ‘I don’t need …’ presents ‘underneath the Christmas tree,' ’’ reads the lawsuit, obtained by Newsday, adding that as in the 1989 song, “Carey implores Santa to ‘bring me the one thing I really need,’ an unnamed ‘you,’ to make their ‘wish come true.’ In all,” the suit contends, “the infringed copyrighted lyrics account for approximately 50% of ‘All I Want for Christmas Is You.’ The chord progression and melodic similarities push this percentage of infringement still higher.”

Jay Ceravolo, manager of the decades-old Vince Vance & the Valiants, said in a statement to Newsday Monday, “We are moving forward to a financial conclusion either through settlement or a trial. It’s self-evident that over 50% of her words in the song are from Vince's rendition. It is simply a case of copyright infringement.”

Neither Carey’s representative nor the plaintiffs’ attorneys responded to Newsday requests for comment.

Five-time Grammy Award winner and Long Island Music and Entertainment Hall of Famer Carey, who was born in Huntington and raised there and in Melville, Northport and Greenlawn, has seen her 1994 holiday standard “All I Want for Christmas Is You” go 12 times Platinum, meaning 12 million units sold. It has reached No. 1 on Billboard magazine’s weekly Hot 100 singles chart each year from 2019 to 2022, and will likely again this year. In April, the song was inducted into the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry.

Vance’s song first hit Billboard’s Hot Country chart the week of Dec. 25, 1993, entering at No. 67 and peaking at No. 55 two weeks later. It reentered that chart the following December, peaking at No. 52 the week of Jan. 7, 1995. According to the lawsuit, the song reached as high as No. 31 on the Hot Country chart in “the 1990s,” but no year is given and this could not be readily confirmed.

The 22-page lawsuit demands damages of “not less than $20,000,000,” as well attorneys’ fees and other specifics, including the impounding and “destruction of all copies of Defendants’ infringing work, including tangible phonorecord copies and electronic or digital copies.”

Vance’s previous lawsuit had been filed June 3, 2022, in the performer’s native Louisiana — where he was inducted into that state’s Music Hall of Fame in 2010 — and withdrawn Nov. 1 of that year.