According to a Billboard report, a copyright lawsuit filed against Taylor swift who was accused of stealing the lyrics for her 2017 hit “Shake It Off,” after a five-year legal process has been dropped.
Attorneys for both parties, Swift and the plaintiffs (songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler) on Monday, back in December 2022, in a joint filing at the California federal court asked the judge to dismiss the case entirely.
Prior to this understanding between both sides, the trail for the case was originally scheduled to begin in January.
With this new agreement by both sides, it means a sudden closure to the case, if is not made public as to whether it included any specific terms of the apparent settlement like whether any money was exchanged or songwriting credits would be changed.
The two songwriters, Sean Hall and Nathan Butler first sued way back in 2017, where they claimed that Taylor Swift sole lyrics to “Shake It Off” from their “Playas Gon’ Play,” a song released by R&B group 3LW in 2001. That was no small accusation, given the song in question: “Shake It Off” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 in September 2014 and ultimately spent 50 weeks on the chart, a mega-hit even for one of music’s biggest stars.
Hall and Butler alleged that the chorus of Swift’s song — “‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.” Were stolen from their song, which contained the line “playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate.” Swift denied the accusation, and a judge agreed to dismiss the suit in 2018 before the decision was reversed on appeal.
In a court filing made this August, Swift asserted that the lyrics in question “were written entirely by me.” “Shake It Off,” she said, were inspired by her experiences as a celebrity and employed “commonly used phrases and comments heard” throughout her life.
Her lawyers said the pair had even emailed their publishers – Sony Music Publishing and Universal Music Publishing Group, respectively – asking for permission to sue, but that both companies had refused the request.
“After their music publishers refused to assign to plaintiffs the claim they assert in this action, their manager unsuccessfully lobbied a United States Congressman to get a House sub-committee to intervene,” Swift’s lawyers alleged in the filing.
That motion was still pending when Monday’s settlement was filed.
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