Sam Smith and Normani’s long-running copyright fight over “Dancing With a Stranger” is moving toward a jury trial after a federal judge refused to end the case in the defendants’ favor, leaving jurors to potentially decide whether the 2019 hit infringed an earlier song built around a strikingly similar central hook.
U.S. District Judge Wesley L. Hsu denied the defendants’ latest motion for summary judgment in a 27-page order filed September 22nd in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California. The ruling does not mean Smith, Normani or their collaborators have been found liable for copyright infringement. It means disputed factual questions remain that the judge concluded cannot be resolved in their favor before trial.
The lawsuit was filed in March 2022 by Sound and Color LLC, representing the interests of songwriter Jordan Vincent and production duo SKX, consisting of Christopher Miranda and Rosco Banlaoi. They allege that Smith and Normani’s “Dancing With a Stranger” infringes an earlier composition created in 2015 and known as “Dancing With Strangers” or “Dancing With a Stranger.”
Smith and the other defendants deny infringement and maintain that the later song was independently created. Their latest effort to end the case argued that the plaintiffs cannot show access to the earlier recording and cannot establish the unusually high degree of similarity needed to prove copying without that evidence. Law360’s coverage details Hsu’s refusal to dispose of the remaining dispute through summary judgment.
The Hook Sits at the Center
The case is not simply about two songs having nearly identical titles.
Song titles and short phrases generally are not protected by copyright on their own. Earlier proceedings also established that “dancing with a stranger” was hardly unique to these two recordings. The district court identified numerous earlier songs using the phrase, including works recorded by Cyndi Lauper, Kitty Wells and other artists.
Sound and Color’s argument is more specific. The plaintiffs focus on the way musical and lyrical elements combine inside the hook, pointing to alleged similarities involving melody, pitch sequence, melodic contour, rhythm, metric placement and the words themselves.
Those ingredients matter collectively rather than simply as a checklist. An American Bar Association review of the appellate proceedings notes that the plaintiffs’ musicologist identified similarities across those musical characteristics while arguing that the combination made the two hooks substantially similar.
The earlier song was written in early 2015. Smith later worked on the hit “Dancing With a Stranger” with collaborators including Jimmy Napes and Stargate members Tor Erik Hermansen and Mikkel Eriksen in August 2018, according to the case record.
Released in January 2019, the Smith and Normani recording became a major international hit. It reached No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 and developed into one of the most commercially successful songs associated with either performer.
Its success raises the potential financial stakes if infringement is eventually established. It does not change the basic question a jury would face: whether protected expression was copied rather than whether two songs simply share recognizable musical characteristics.
The Case Was Already Dismissed Once
Smith and the other defendants have already won this case once at the district-court level.
In September 2023, Judge Hsu granted summary judgment in their favor after examining the two hooks under copyright’s substantial-similarity framework. The court concluded that many individual elements identified by Sound and Color were commonplace or unprotectable and that the protectable material remaining was not sufficiently similar to support the infringement claim.
That ruling also dealt with the shared lyrical phrase. Evidence of earlier songs using “dancing with a stranger” reinforced the conclusion that the plaintiffs could not claim exclusive rights to those words by themselves.
For a time, the decision appeared to end the case without a jury ever hearing it.
The Ninth Circuit reversed that outcome in April 2025. A three-judge appellate panel concluded that the district court had separated the musical ingredients too aggressively when considering Sound and Color’s selection-and-arrangement theory. A reasonable jury, the panel held, could find substantial similarity in the particular way the allegedly shared elements were combined.
A Loeb & Loeb analysis of the decision notes that the Ninth Circuit sent the case back for further proceedings rather than deciding that infringement had actually occurred.
That distinction remains central now.
Common Elements Can Form a Protected Hook
Pop songwriting depends heavily on a shared musical vocabulary. Basic chord progressions, short lyrical phrases, familiar rhythms, common melodic movements and standard structures appear in thousands of songs without creating copyright infringement.
No songwriter gets ownership of those building blocks simply by using them first.
Copyright can become more complicated when otherwise ordinary ingredients are assembled into a particular combination. A selection-and-arrangement claim asks whether the writer’s specific choice and organization of elements contains enough original expression to receive protection even when some individual pieces would not qualify on their own.
The Ninth Circuit concluded that Sound and Color had presented enough evidence for a jury to potentially consider that theory here. Its decision did not transform every similarity identified by the plaintiffs into protected material. Instead, it focused attention on the hook as a combination.
That makes the musical details unusually important. The dispute is not merely whether both songs contain the phrase “dancing with a stranger.” Experts have argued over how the words align with pitch, rhythm, melodic contour and placement inside the measure.
Smith’s side disputes the significance of those similarities and argues that the allegedly shared features are common musical material that cannot support the plaintiffs’ infringement theory.
A jury will not simply be asked which chorus sounds more like the other. It may have to decide whether the particular combination identified by Sound and Color qualifies for copyright protection and whether the later song is sufficiently similar to that protected combination.
Without Access, Striking Similarity Becomes Crucial
The case became more difficult for the plaintiffs after the Ninth Circuit sent it back to the district court.
Copyright plaintiffs typically try to establish some evidence that the creators of an accused song had access to the earlier work. Access can support an inference that similarities resulted from copying rather than independent creation.
Sound and Color ultimately abandoned its access theory. Without evidence that Smith or the other songwriters encountered the earlier recording, the plaintiffs are relying on a more demanding route known as striking similarity.
In practical terms, the argument is that the similarities are sufficiently unusual to support an inference of copying even without evidence showing how the defendants could have heard the earlier song.
Smith and the other defendants moved for summary judgment again in July, arguing that Sound and Color could not satisfy that standard. They challenged the plaintiffs’ expert evidence and maintained that their song was independently created. Music Business Worldwide detailed the defense arguments when the motion was filed.
The defense also alleges that the plaintiffs’ earlier recording itself incorporates unlicensed samples, including material associated with Masters at Work’s “The Ha Dance” and Lyn Collins’ “Think (About It).” Those are defense allegations rather than findings that the court has established as fact.
Sound and Color disputes the defendants’ conclusions and continues to rely on expert analysis of the two compositions.
Judge Hsu Leaves the Dispute to Jurors
Hsu’s latest ruling does not decide which side’s musicologist has the better analysis.
Instead, the judge found that Sound and Color had introduced enough evidence to create genuine factual disputes over striking similarity and independent creation. Those are questions that cannot be resolved against the plaintiffs through summary judgment on the current record.
“Plaintiffs have sufficiently introduced an issue of material fact regarding striking similarity and independent creation,” Hsu wrote, a passage quoted by Rolling Stone Australia.
Independent creation is especially important because copyright law does not prohibit two songwriters from separately arriving at similar music. If Smith and their collaborators created “Dancing With a Stranger” independently, similarity alone would not establish copying.
The plaintiffs therefore still have substantial work to do at trial. Surviving summary judgment does not shift the burden of proof or create a presumption that infringement occurred.
What changed with Hsu’s order is procedural but significant: the defendants have not persuaded the court to remove those factual questions from a jury.
Other Pop Cases Drew Similar Lines
The problem of separating protectable songwriting from familiar musical language has surfaced repeatedly in major copyright cases.
Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse” was initially found to infringe Marcus Gray’s “Joyful Noise,” but the verdict was later overturned. Courts concluded that the disputed ostinato relied on commonplace musical elements and that the plaintiffs had not shown a protectable combination sufficient to sustain the verdict.
Led Zeppelin successfully defended “Stairway to Heaven” against allegations involving Spirit’s “Taurus,” with the Ninth Circuit emphasizing limits on copyright protection for common musical components. Ed Sheeran also prevailed at trial against claims that “Thinking Out Loud” infringed the composition of Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On.”
Those outcomes do not dictate what happens to Smith and Normani. Each case turns on its own compositions, evidence and legal theories.
They do illustrate the line courts repeatedly have to draw. Protect music too broadly and ordinary songwriting tools can become litigation traps. Protect combinations too narrowly and a writer whose actual arrangement has been copied may struggle to enforce it.
The “Dancing With a Stranger” dispute places that tension inside a short pop hook rather than an elaborate instrumental passage. Hooks are designed to rely on repetition and immediacy, which makes distinguishing familiar technique from protectable expression particularly consequential.
A Trial Would Decide More Than Similarity
A jury trial would involve more than playing both recordings and asking jurors whether they sound alike.
Sound and Color still bears the burden of proving its copyright claim. The defendants can challenge which portions of the earlier work receive protection, attack the plaintiffs’ striking-similarity evidence and continue presenting independent creation as a complete defense.
Expert testimony is likely to remain central because the case has already turned on competing musicological analyses of pitch, melodic contour, rhythm, lyrics and the selection and arrangement of those features inside the hooks.
The procedural history makes the trial particularly unusual. Smith and the other defendants won summary judgment in 2023, saw that victory reversed by the Ninth Circuit in 2025 and then made a second attempt in 2026 to resolve the remaining dispute without a jury.
That second attempt has now failed.
No court has found that Sam Smith, Normani or their collaborators infringed Sound and Color’s song. The September ruling establishes something much narrower: enough factual disagreement remains that Judge Hsu will not decide the case for the defendants before trial.
More than four years after the lawsuit was filed, a jury may now have to answer the question at its center: whether the resemblance between two pop hooks came from independent use of familiar musical language or from legally actionable copying of a protected combination.