Taylor Swift must face trial over a copyright suit regarding her chart-topping 2014 single “Shake It Off,” a judge ruled on Thursday, Billboard reports.
The suit is over the track’s lyrics featuring nods to “players” and “haters,” which are alleged to have be snagged from R&B group 3LW and their 2001 song “Playas Gon’ Play.” While Swift’s team asked for the case to be tossed, U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald ruled otherwise.
Fitzgerald said there were “enough objective similarities” in the track to where he wasn’t able to dismiss the case— Swift would still need to face a jury, despite her case already having what would be “a strong closing argument.”
“Even though there are some noticeable differences between the works, there are also significant similarities in word usage and sequence/structure,” the judge recently wrote. “Although Defendants’ experts strongly refute the implication that there are substantial similarities, the Court is not inclined to overly credit their opinions here.”
Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler first filed the case in 2017 over lines “playas, they gonna play” and “haters, they gonna hate,” which are similar to Swift’s now-memorable chorus. In 2018, Fitzgerald initially said the lines were “short phrases that lack the modicum of originality and creativity required for copyright protection,” pointing to 13 other songs with similar lyrics like “Playa Hater” by The Notorious B.I.G. Fitzgerald then had to see the case again after a federal appeals court reversed his ruling.
“Our clients are finally moving closer to the justice they so richly deserve,” the songwriters’ attorney Marina Bogorad of Gerard Fox Law PC, said. “The opinion … is especially gratifying to them because it reinforces the idea that their creativity and unique expression cannot be misappropriated without any retribution.”
No dates have been set for the trial yet.
