bitflipper
My first reaction was WhoTF is Robin Thicke, and what a greedy ashole he must be!
Come to find out he's really not the villain in this story. Rather, it's Marvin Gaye's descendants who feel they have a right to a perpetual income from their forebear's labors and have been demanding payment. The purpose of RT's suit is to get a judge to declare that the two songs are not the same, thereby preempting any potential legal action by the Gaye family.
I downloaded the show and listened to snippits of the songs in question. There's no doubt that RT owes a debt of gratitude to Marvin Gaye - along with Smokey Robinson, Jackie Wilson, Berry Gordy, James Jamerson and the rest of the Funk Brothers. Don't we all?
There is probably more to this strategy than meets the eye, and it probably has to do with the exorbitant cost of legal action. The Gaye heirs begin by warning Thicke that he has infringed their intellectual property. It does not cost much money to write a letter, and if Thicke offers a reasonably inexpensive settlement, they can sign off on what may or may not be provable true infringement and get some real money for a small investment. But if Gaye family decide to go to court, it may well cost them more than they can afford, or at least more than they can justify investing on an uncertain outcome. The legal costs of just the discovery process can break most people, and unless the case is a slam dunk, finding an attorney to take the case (let alone front expert witness fees etc.) on a contingency fee is a long shot.
But if you have an active career, a hot selling hit and a record company legal department behind you, legal costs may not matter all that much. Once you have filed in court, the other party has to come up with some real money in order to keep from being run over. Presumably you cannot add claims of malicious prosecution or abuse of process against the other party if you initiate the suit, but there may be some theory under which you can make their initial claim to rights actionable. In any case, you have forced them to spend more than they can afford, and can offer to let them to withdraw, settle on your terms, or forfeit; in effect either proving or forcing them to admit that your work is original. The public relations value of that outcome is probably worth the risk and the money, and it will go a long way toward making your fan base see the work as a tribute rather than a rip-off.
In theory legal cases are decided on the merits, but, in reality, it is very often the guy with the most money going into the fight who comes out ahead. So the story does not really have a hero. Is the bad guy the family who are trying to extort payment via frivolous threats of legal action, or the legal colossus that can grind them under foot without breaking a sweat? In this case there may well be a more even match, but if it were an unknown composer trying to assert this claim, the advantage is clearly not with him. An aggressive legal stance on the part of the well-heeled alleged infringer may well be the wave of the future.