If you come at the Queen of Christmas, you best not miss.
After defeating a copyright lawsuit over her holiday classic “All I Want for Christmas Is You,” Mariah Carey is now demanding that the man who sued her repay a whopping $1 million she and others spent on lawyers defending against his “absurd” accusations.
Songwriter Vince Vance claimed that Carey stole key elements of the iconic holiday track from his earlier song of the same name. But a judge dismissed the case entirely last year, ruling the two songs shared only “commonplace Christmas song clichés.”
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Now, Mariah’s lawyers want Vance punished for bringing such a “meritless” case, which they say was aimed at coercing her into paying him “an undeserved windfall.” In a motion obtained and first reported by Billboard, they want the judge to order him to repay $1,048,873 that she and others spent over years of costly litigation.
“This is an exceptional case in which plaintiffs, represented by counsel, ignored the law and stubbornly pursued an absurd claim over commonplace Christmas tropes used differently,” Mariah’s lawyers write. “Plaintiff gambled on bringing a defective, thirty-year-old copyright infringement claim and necessitated costly litigation in the hopes of a massive payout.”
Carey’s lawyers say Vance’s allegations were obviously flawed from the very start – since the only similarities he claimed were “a few fragmentary Christmas tropes like ‘mistletoe,’ ‘Santa Claus,’ and ‘stockings’” and basic musical elements. And they say they warned him repeatedly that they would seek to punish him if he persisted.
“But Mr. Stone doubled down,” Mariah’s lawyers write. “Plaintiffs continued to ignore defense counsel’s repeated warnings and requests to dismiss the lawsuit, and instead forced over two years of litigation, pursuing a meritless claim for over $20 million in damages and a permanent injunction barring defendants’ work.”
Vance’s attorney did not immediately return a request for comment on the motion.
Vance (real name Andy Stone) first sued Carey in 2022, claiming “All I Want” infringed the copyrights to a 1989 song of the exact same name recorded by his Vince Vance and the Valiants. He claimed that the earlier track received “extensive airplay” during the 1993 holiday season — a year before Carey released her now-better-known hit.
“All I Want,” which debuted in 1994 and was bolstered by the 2003 holiday rom-com Love Actually, has become a Christmas cash cow — steadily rising with the growth of streaming services before ballooning in popularity in recent years. The song has retaken the top spot on the Billboard Hot 100 every holiday season since 2019, hitting No. 1 in December for a record-breaking 21st week.
Last March, Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani thoroughly rejected Vance’s case. She cited evidence that the two tracks were “very different songs” that shared only “commonplace Christmas song clichés” that had been used in many earlier holiday tunes.
In the wake of that ruling, the judge already ordered Vance’s attorney, Gerard Fox, to repay some legal bills over specific unnecessary motions. In issuing that earlier order — $109,983 total awarded to Carey, Sony Music and others named in the case – the judge said the lawyer “must now face the consequences.”
In Tuesday’s motion, Carey’s teams asked the judge to order Vance himself to pay an additional $938,890 for bringing the overall case itself – with $596,479 going to Mariah, $164,113 to Sony Music, $96,885 to co-writer Walter Afanasieff and $81,412 to Kobalt Music. They also want Vance held jointly liable for the $109,983 already owed by his lawyer from the earlier ruling.
That demand might seem high, but such legal bills are typical for elite law firms in New York and Los Angeles after years of complex litigation. Carey was represented by veteran music litigator Peter Anderson and others from Davis Wright Tremaine; Sony was defended by a team from Pryor Cashman led by top litigators Ilene S. Farkas and Benjamin S. Akley; Afanasieff was repped by Kenneth D. Freundlich, another longtime music trial attorney; and Kobalt was defended by Bert H. Deixler and others from the firm Kendall Brill & Kelly.
In the American legal system, each side usually pays its own legal bills, even including defendants who defeat a lawsuit that they feel they shouldn’t have faced. But such awards are more common under federal copyright law, which has a specific provision allowing for fee awards to deter bad lawsuits. And under that rubric, Carey’s lawyers say Vance’s “All I Want” case more than qualifies.
“Defective copyright infringement claims, like plaintiffs’ claim here, burden the Court, cause potentially damaging negative publicity for recording artists, authors, photographers, filmmakers, and others, and threaten to chill a creative industry,” Tuesday’s filing reads. “Yet, plaintiffs pursued this lawsuit all the way to summary judgment, forcing defendants to incur hundreds of thousands in attorney’s fees to obtain dismissal of a claim that should never have been brought in the first place.”