A month after Taylor Swift swept the world off its feet for the release of her studio album “Red (Taylor’s Version),” celebrations seem to have been put on hold for the singer-songwriter as she now faces a lawsuit for allegedly copying lyrics from another song for her 2014 hit single “Shake It Off.”
Taylor was accused of lifting words from the 2014 song “Playas Gon’ Play” by R&B girl group 3LW, specifically the line “players, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate.” Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who wrote the lyrics of “Playas Gon’ Play” claimed that the use of “playas” and “hatas” was unique to their song.
In Taylor’s song, she sings: “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play, and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
Taylor’s representatives in 2017 called the accusations of copyright infringement “ridiculous” and “nothing more than a money grab” and the case was eventually dismissed in 2018. The “Playas Gon’ Play” songwriters, however, filed for an appeal and the case was revived in 2019.
Now, a US judge reportedly refused Taylor’s request for the case to be dismissed once more and said that it should officially go to a jury trial.
“Even though there are some noticeable differences between the works, there are also significant similarities in word usage and sequence/structure,” said the judge. “The court cannot presently determine that no reasonable juror could find substantial similarity of lyrical phrasing, word arrangement, or poetic structure between the two works.”
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