A copyright infringement lawsuit against Taylor Swift has been dismissed with prejudice, meaning the plaintiffs cannot refile the same complaint in the same court. The suit had been filed in a California federal court in 2017 by songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who claimed that Swift who took lyrics from 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play” for her 1989 single “Shake It Off.”
The copyright infringement case had been scheduled to go to trial in January 2023. Pitchfork has reached out to attorneys for Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, as well as attorneys and representatives for Taylor Swift, for comment and more information on the dismissal.
In the original complaint, Hall and Butler alleged that lyrics from “Shake It Off” (“’Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play, and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate”) took from lines that they’d written (“Playas, they gonna play/And haters, they gonna hate”). Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald dismissed the case in 2018, noting that the lyrics in question were “too brief, unoriginal, and uncreative to warrant protection under the Copyright Act.” In October 2019, the case was revived by an appeals court.
Earlier this year, Swift vehemently denied stealing lyrics for her hit single. “The lyrics to ‘Shake It Off’ were written entirely by me,” she stated in a sworn declaration. “Until learning about Plaintiffs’ claim in 2017, I had never heard the song ‘Playas Gon’ Play’ and had never heard of that song or the group 3LW.”
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