After five long years, Taylor Swift can take a deep breath: A lawsuit filed by two songwriters who accuse the singer of copying her lyrics from “Shake It Off” is dismissed. It is not the first time that a court has sided with the 33-year-old.
The lawsuit filed by two songwriters against US superstar Taylor Swift for copyright infringement is off the table, according to the New York Times. In it, Sean Hall and Nathan Butler claimed the singer copied her lyrics from the hit song “Shake It Off.” According to the newspaper, a judge dismissed the case on Monday, just weeks before it was due to go to court.
This is said to have been done following a joint application by Swift’s attorneys and the songwriters’ representatives. According to the report, no details emerge from the short application, and there is also no indication of an agreement between the parties.
The dismissal ends a five-year legal battle over the song “Shake It Off,” which Swift released in 2014 as the first single from her album 1989. Hall and Butler filed the lawsuit against Swift in 2017. They claimed at the time that the lines in Swift’s song “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play” and “the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” in “Shake It Off” infringed their copyright. In their 2000 song “Playas Gon’ Play” by 3LW, they wrote, “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate.”
A judge dismissed the lawsuit in 2018 on the grounds that a phrase like “haters gonna hate” was too “banal” to be copyrightable. However, an appeals court overturned the verdict a year later, remanding the case back to the district court, which ruled that the matter should go to trial. The trial should begin in January.
Last December, Swift’s attorneys asked the judge to reconsider his decision and dismiss the case. The 33-year-old had stated that she did not know the 3LW song. She was ten years old when the song came out.
