Taylor Swift and her lawyers are attempting to avoid a copyright lawsuit over her 2014 smash “Shake It Off.” Swift’s attorneys have filed a fresh petition, seeking that U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald rethink his judgement after a federal judge ordered that a copyright infringement lawsuit against the singer will proceed to trial.
As per Entertainment Weekly, the complaint claims that Taylor Swift plagiarised lyrics from the girl group 3LW’s song “Playas Gon’ Play” from 2000. Swift’s attorneys argue in court documents filed on December 23 that allowing the case to proceed would have been a “unprecedented” decision, noting that the judge’s order “does something that, further than [Defendants] are aware, no other court has done, namely finding a potentially valid infringement claim with the use of two short public domain phrases along with allegedly similar ideas and concepts. The defendants respectfully request that the ruling be reconsidered.”
“Plaintiffs admitted, and it is undisputed, that the phrases ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate’ are unprotected and in the public domain,” the motion from Swift’s lawyers continued, adding that unless the case is dismissed, “Plaintiffs could sue everyone who writes, sings, or publicly says ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate,'” and “to permit that is unprecedented and ‘cheat[s] the public domain.'”
Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who wrote ‘Playas Gon’ Play,’ sued Taylor Swift in 2017, claiming that the words “the players going to play, play, play, play, play and the haters going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” in ‘Shake It Off’ infringed on the copyright of the 2000 song.
In 2018, Judge Fitzgerald rejected the action, claiming that a phrase like “haters going to hate” is too “banal” to be protected by copyright. A year later, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the decision, remanding the matter to the district court.
“Even while there are some notable distinctions between the works, there are also considerable parallels in word usage and sequence/structure,” Fitzgerald stated in his December 9 order permitting the lawsuit to proceed, and denying the defendants’ move for summary judgement.