Bon Jovi’s $400 Billion Lawsuit Revisited

Samuel Bartley Steele, who filed the appeal Nov. 6, claims that Bon Jovi’s 2007 tune “I Love This Town” rips off Steele’s song “(Man I Really) Love This Team.”

Steele says his song was released in 2004 and performed by his act, the Bart Steele Band, as an ode to Boston’s Red Sox baseball team, according to the BBC News.

He claims his band performed “(Man I Really) Love This Team” on local TV and that he gave copies of the tune to Red Sox players and executives. He even passed on copies to MLB in hopes of trying to get the organization interested in using the song to market the sport.

But the MLB didn’t take advantage of Steele’s songwriting chops. Rather, Bon Jovi’s “I Love This Town,” which hails from the band’s Lost Highway album, was released during the 2007 play-offs and used by the MLB to promote play-off baseball on Time Warner’s TBS cable channel.

Steele has two theories about how Bon Jovi allegedly stole his song. One idea is that Jon Bon Jovi heard the song while campaigning for John Kerry in Boston during the 2004 U.S. presidential election. (I’m assuming he means that after a long day campaigning, Jon Bon Jovi was hanging out in his hotel room and saw the song on local TV … and then a light bulb went off in his head about a new song, except he was really being a mean copy-cat. Sure.) His other theory is that a Red Sox executive passed the song on to the singer.

Last year a district judge dismissed the claim because he ruled no reasonable jury could conclude there was substantial similarity between the two songs.

Steele’s own musicologist even testified that the tunes weren’t very similar.

 Click here for the BBC News story.