in what s expected to be one of the biggest all british heavyweight fights in boxing history. now on bbc news, musician ed sheeran speaks exclusively about his shape of you copyright lawsuit. # so you can keep me # inside the pocket of your ripped jeans.#. ed sheeran faced claims that his 2015 song photograph was strikingly similar to the song amazing by x factor winner matt cardle. sheeran settled out of court without admitting any guilt. by the time he d become the uk s leading male recording artist, he d released three of the top ten best selling albums of the last decade in the uk. # i m in love with your body.#. and his 2017 song shape of you, co written with his regular songwriting partnersjohnny mcdaid and steve mac, remains the most streamed song on spotify ever, with over three billion streams to date. but the song led to another lawsuit for sheeran. this time, the grime artist sami chokri claimed that sheeran had borrowed a refrain from chokri s song 0h why for shap
# holding me closer.#. and there was a claim made on that. and we were basically advised to settle that, because i was on tour, lots of other things going on and it was basically, you haven t got time to do this and also there s a culture around this that you probably would lose. so we settled that. and i think from there, much like with the blurred lines case, the floodgates opened and they go, well, if you did that then, and i think that has added into this, basically. do you regret settling there or do you think that was then and this is now and.? personally, yes, personally, yes. and but not from a financial point of view, it s from a. like, i didn t play photograph for ages after that. ijust stopped playing it, i felt weird about it. it kind of made me feel dirty. and we ve now got to a point where we actually got all of the song again and we ve managed to get all of our bits back and again, not from a financial point of view,
yeah, you described it as like rocket science, only more complicated. yeah, well. that s going to follow you around forever. yeah, sometimes you say something and then, you know, time machine and all. # i m in love with your body #. i m in love with your body.#. but the making of that song, tell me if i m wrong, but it was like an hour and a half, is that right? it was a relatively short period of one day. yeah. and i think a lot of what the case boiled down to with this is not people not believing that i could write a song in an hour and a half. but what i wanted to say is, like, i work every day at my craft, every day to be able to do a song in an hour and a half, and we write multiple songs. we actually bookended the case with two studio sessions with me, johnny and steve, where we just wrote as many songs as possible. in the first day, we did five and the last day we did three, and those are not uncommon days for us.
just to feel like it was our song again. so, yeah, i d say you probably agree with that as well, right? yeah. i think at the time, we took the best advice we could get and it was new. we d never been in that situation before and we were kind of bamboozled by the culture and what was going on. so we had to make a decision on it and we made a choice at the time that we can t change. but yes, i certainly feel some regret around it. and also, if you read the judgment, he sort of agreed with our point. anyway, read it. let s go on now to how you make music and the creative process and the degree to which this does or doesn t influence it, because you re very open about certain influences. no scrubs, for example, in the case of that song, you talk about it. me and johnny, we have countless songs that we ve done, like. on my second one, johnny started working on my second album, but there was a tune called nina, where we sampled a wretch 32 song and
when ed gets into flow, it s happening in real time. so, he can nearly write a song as fast as he can perform a song. it s really something to behold. now, you ve spoken about changing the way you work since the photograph case and recording things, so you have a kind of evidence base of what you were doing and what you were thinking about, what you were talking about when you were creating a song. at the same time, you don t want to inhibit that freedom, that free flow that sometimes takes shape very quickly. so, does this in any way change the way you work going forward, or are you just hopeful that you can push on through? filming, not so much, because it s my best friend that does it and he s basically part of the family, so he s just. yeah, i don t think that changes the writing, but in terms of, yeah, there s definitely. i mean, there s the george harrison quote where he says he s scared to touch the piano because he might be touching someone else s note.