A federal judge has ruled that a copyright infringement lawsuit against Sam Smith and Normani over their 2019 hit "Dancing With a Stranger" will proceed to trial. The judge rejected the defendants' motion to dismiss the case, finding sufficient grounds to question whether they had copied from a 2015 song of the same name by the group Sound and Color. This means a jury will now decide whether the similarities between the two tracks constitute copyright infringement.

The lawsuit, originally filed in March 2022 but dismissed before being revived on appeal, centres on whether the defendants' song hook was derived from the plaintiffs' earlier work. Judge Wesley L. Hsu rejected the defendants' argument that analysing musical elements in isolation—pitch, rhythm, metric placement and contour separately—would show no infringement. He also dismissed their claim that the 2015 song should not receive copyright protection because it allegedly incorporated unauthorised samples from other works, ruling the jury must decide this disputed fact.