A legal complaint filed in California claims that British pop artist Olivia Dean’s song I’ve Seen It incorporates substantial musical elements from Bill Withers’ established soul composition Just The Two of Us. The track appears on Dean’s 2025 album The Art of Loving, which garnered significant critical recognition including a Brit Award for album of the year.
The lawsuit was initiated by Mattie Music Group, which manages Withers’ music catalogue. According to legal documents, the publishers hired a musicologist who identified what they characterize as substantial similarities between the two compositions, including what they describe as repeated copying of melodic material from the Withers original. The complaint names Capitol Records, Universal Music Group, and Dean’s publishing companies as defendants, though it does not name Dean or her co-writers Bastian Langebæk and Max Wolfgang as individual defendants.
Publishers stated they notified Dean’s record label of the alleged infringement in August, but the track remained available for distribution. To establish plagiarism, the publishers must demonstrate that Dean and her collaborators had prior exposure to Withers’ composition. The legal filing argues that the song’s substantial commercial history—including sustained radio airplay over decades—would have provided reasonable opportunity for the musicians to encounter the original work.
I’ve Seen It, which serves as the closing track on The Art of Loving, is an acoustic ballad addressing various forms of love. Dean has discussed the song’s creation in previous interviews, describing an emotional response upon first hearing the finished composition. The track has generated significant streaming activity with approximately 246 million plays on Spotify, while the Withers original has accumulated 948 million streams. The defendants have not yet filed a response to the lawsuit.
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