British singer Sam Smith agreed in October to pay royalties to Tom Petty for the song Stay With Me, a soulful single that topped Billboard charts and that is essentially a remix of Petty's 1989 classic Won't Back Down. U.K. newspaper the Sun broke the news this week. Stay With Me has sold more than 3 million copies, and Smith's album had the third-highest U.S. sales overall last year, behind the soundtrack for Frozen and Taylor Swift's 1989, according to Nielsen (PDF). Taking plagiarists to court has often been a good bet for a wronged artist, as shown by a brief review of musical theft and its fallout.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Tki-gzX_9k
