{"id":2211316,"date":"2025-12-24T20:08:07","date_gmt":"2025-12-24T20:08:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/?p=2211316"},"modified":"2025-12-24T20:08:07","modified_gmt":"2025-12-24T20:08:07","slug":"all-i-want-for-christmas-is-you-bags-mariah-carey-even-more-money","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-you-bags-mariah-carey-even-more-money\/","title":{"rendered":"‘All I Want for Christmas Is You’ Bags Mariah Carey Even More Money\u00a0"},"content":{"rendered":"

<\/p>\n

What do you get the Queen of Christmas who has everything? Probably just more money generated by her hit holiday song.<\/p>\n

Since Mariah Carey<\/strong> first belted \u201cI don\u2019t want a lot for Christmas,\u201d she\u2019s hauled in over $100 million in royalties over the 31 years since its release. This year, she gets to add even more jolly dollar bills than usual to the pile, after being gifted attorney\u2019s fees in a dismissed copyright lawsuit over the song behind the second saddest moment in <\/a>Love Actually. (The saddest being Joni Mitchell<\/strong>\u2018s \u201cBoth Sides Now,\u201d obviously.)<\/p>\n

\n

In November 2023, Andy Stone (who performs as Vince Vance) and Troy Powers sued Carey for \u201ca very confident\u201d<\/a> $20 million, claiming her version plagiarized their 1989 country-ish Christmas kind-of-hit song\u2014performed under the name Vince Vance & the Valiants and also titled, \u201cAll I Want for Christmas Is You.\u201d The lawsuit alleged that Carey\u2019s song copied the \u201ccompositional structure of an extended comparison between a loved one and trappings of seasonal luxury, and further includes several of Plaintiffs\u2019 lyrical phrases.\u201d Pretty typical of a holiday song, no?<\/p>\n

You might recognize the song<\/a>, but it\u2019s as different from Carey\u2019s version as \u201cJingle Bells\u201d is from \u201cJingle Bells Rock\u201d: they both talk about longing for someone for Christmas and have \u201cChristmas\u201d in the title. And I know this isn\u2019t how copyright infringement is determined, but Vance\u2019s version is more jazz-y and melancholy, while Carey\u2019s is just pure pop fun. As Jesse Eisenberg as Mark Zuckerberg tells the Winklevoss twins in\u00a0The Social Network<\/a>: \u201cIf you guys were the inventors of Facebook, you\u2019d have invented Facebook.\u201d<\/p>\n

But that lawsuit was officially dismissed in March. This week, new court documents show the judge found the lawsuit \u201clacked merit\u201d and \u201cdetermined there was good reason to deter people from filing baseless lawsuits,\u201d thereby awarding Carey $92,300 in sanctions\u2014to be paid for by Vance\u2019s attorney. An additional $20,000 was awarded to a few others who were involved on Carey\u2019s side.<\/p>\n

Stone first filed a copyright lawsuit against Carey in 2022, but that was quickly thrown out, and then Stone filed it again with Powers the following year. When the first suit was dismissed, the BBC pointed out that the U.S. Copyright Office has 177 registered songs<\/a> titled \u201cAll I Want for Christmas Is You,\u201d many of which were released before the 1989 version. All Christmas songs are all Christmas songs are all Christmas songs.<\/p>\n\n