Mariah Carey has been exonerated in the legal dispute over her 1994 holiday hit ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You.’ A judge has declared that Andy Stone’s song of the same name was not “substantially similar” to Carey’s well-known festive classic. Despite Stone’s claims that Carey had heard his song and copied significant elements from it, earning him a $20 million lawsuit, the court decided that the two songs merely incorporated common Christmas song clichés found in several earlier compositions.

Judge Mónica Ramírez Almadani granted Carey’s request for summary judgment, thereby ruling in her favor without proceeding to trial. This decision grants a victory to Carey and co-writer Walter Afanasieff, the other co-defendant in the case. The judge additionally chastized Stone and his legal team for presenting “frivolous” arguments, declaring that their evidence was a “vague and incomprehensible mixture of factual assertions and conclusions, subjective opinions and other irrelevant evidence.” As a consequence, Stone has been mandated to cover Carey’s legal expenses arising from this case.

Furthermore, it is worth noting that earlier, the plaintiff’s lawyer, Douglas M. Schmidt, had argued that about “50 per cent of the words” in both songs were nearly identical and in the same sequence. Nevertheless, the judge determined that Stone’s lawyers failed to prove that the two songs were “substantially similar.”

Therefore, Mariah Carey’s ownership and creative rights to ‘All I Want For Christmas Is You’ have been upheld, and the lawsuit against her has been dismissed.

Source: https://www.euronews.com/culture/2025/03/21/mariah-carey-wins-all-i-want-for-christmas-is-you-lawsuit