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29 October 2019CopyrightRory O'Neill

Taylor Swift faces ‘Shake It Off’ copyright suit after Ninth Circuit revives case

Taylor Swift will once again face claims that she ripped off some of the lyrics for her hook in the 2014 hit “Shake It Off”, after the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit revived a copyright lawsuit over the song.

Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler sued Swift in 2017, claiming that the “Player’s gonna play, play, play, play, play/And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” refrain in “Shake It Off” was derived from their 2001 song “Playas Gon’ Play”.

Swift was initially able to avoid the claims after the US District Court for the Central District of California dismissed the suit on summary judgment.

Hall and Butler’s song, performed by the girl vocal group 3LW, featured the lyric “Playas, they gonna play/And haters, they gonna hate”.

In its decision, the district court ruled that the lyrics were, in fact, not original or creative enough to enjoy copyright protection.

The two songwriters will now get another chance to pursue their claims after the Ninth Circuit found that the district court had inappropriately “constituted itself as the final judge of the worth of an expressive work”.

“Originality, as we have long recognised, is normally a question of fact,” the Ninth Circuit said.

The ruling cited late US Supreme Court justice Oliver Holmes, who wrote in 1903 that: “It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits.”

Applying this principle to musical copyright, the district court erred in establishing a lack of originality as a matter of law, the Ninth Circuit said.

Hall and Butler were not the first to sue Swift over the phrase. As previously reported by WIPR, singer  Jesse Braham took the pop star to court in 2015, claiming infringement of his copyright for his track “Haters Gone Hate”.

Braham uploaded the song to YouTube in 2013, and later claimed on Twitter that “Shake It Off” wouldn’t exist without his own work.

The singer had been looking for $42 million as compensation for the alleged infringement, but his suit was dismissed by the Central California district court.

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20 September 2017   Pop star Taylor Swift has again found herself in court over alleged copyright infringement in relation to her hit song “Shake it Off”.
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15 November 2019   Taylor Swift says music manager Scooter Braun is “exercising tyrannical control” over her music by stopping her from performing her old songs at the upcoming American Music Awards.
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22 November 2019   Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” is at the centre of another copyright infringement complaint, this time by a California-based songwriter who is suing the singer for $42 million.