NME is reporting that both Mark Ronson, and collaborator Bruno Mars, are being sued for copyright infringment, over their chart-topping hit ‘Uptown Funk.’

The people behind the lawsuit are the band Collage, a funk group that were active largely in the early 80’s, and claim that parts of ‘Uptown Funk’ are “deliberately and clearly copied” from their 1983 single ‘Young Girls’. Pitchfork acquired the official complaint from Collage, and the band are quoted as saying:

“Upon information and belief, many of the main instrumental attributes and themes of ‘Uptown Funk’ are deliberately and clearly copied from ‘Young Girls’, including, but not limited to, the distinct funky specifically noted and timed consistent guitar riffs present throughout the compositions, virtually if not identical bass notes and sequence, rhythm, structure, crescendo of horns and synthesizers rendering the compositions almost indistinguishable if played over each other and strikingly similar if played in consecutively.”

You can compare the two songs for yourself :

Only one member of Collage is still alive, in Larry White, but the other two members of the band are being represented by their respective estates.

It is well worth noting that this is not the first claim of infringement that Ronson and Mars have faced for their ubiquitous hit. Earlier this year all-female group The Sequence claimed that ‘Uptown Funk’ infringed on their song ‘Funk You Up’ due to the obvious lyrical similarities the songs share.  However this didn’t culminate in a formal lawsuit, as this new case has.

A year previous to this, The Gap Band were themselves awarded a songwriting credit on Uptown Funk, following a legal claim that suggested that their 1979 hit ‘Oops Upside Your Head’ had heavily influenced the writing of ‘Uptown Funk’ taking the number of credited songwriters on the track from 6 to 11. By adding the 5 additional writers, Ronson and Mars were able to avoid the escalation of the lawsuit, to the level that saw Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke have to pay Marvin Gaye’s family for the resemblance of Gaye’s song ‘Got To Give It Up’ and Williams’ and Thicke’s 2013 hit ‘Blurred Lines’.