A month before trial, Taylor Swift‘s copyright action from two composers accusing her of stealing the words to her 2014 hit single Shake It Off was dismissed.
According to court documents submitted on Monday in federal court in California, a federal judge dismissed the case after the two parties decided to settle the lawsuit. The agreement’s terms weren’t made public.
Requests for comment from Swift representatives went unanswered.
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Swift was accused of stealing the lyrics to her song about players playing and haters hating from 3LW’s 2001 hit Playas Gon’ Play, according to songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who sued Swift in 2018.
Swift sang “[T]he players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” while the girl group sang “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate.”
The agreement was reached a month before the over-five-year-old case’s trial was set to begin on January 17.
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The outcome of the case depended on whether Hall and Butler’s lyrics qualify for federal copyright protection. The alleged infringing lines are “short phrases that lack the modicum of originality and creativity” required to charge copyright infringement, according to U.S. District Judge Michael Fitzgerald, who found they weren’t. He threw out the lawsuit.
By 2001, “players, haters, and player haters” had become deeply ingrained in American popular culture, according to Fitzgerald. “The concept of actors acting in accordance with their essential nature is not at all creative; it is banal.”
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However, a federal appeals court reopened the case after finding that the federal judge should not have been dismissed.
“By concluding that, ‘for such short phrases to be protected under the Copyright Act, they must be more creative than the lyrics at issues here,’ the district court constituted itself as the final judge of the worth of an expressive work,” the three-judge panel remarked. “Because the absence of originality is not established either on the face of the complaint or through the judicially noticed matters, we reverse the district court’s dismissal.”