Taylor Swift says Shake It Off song-theft accusers don’t even have the right to sue

completemusicupdate.com:

As the song theft legal battle in relation to Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’ rumbles on, at a court hearing yesterday attention turned to the argument that the songwriters suing Swift don’t even have the legal right to pursue the litigation.In this particular song-theft case, songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler accuse Swift of ripping off their 2001 song ‘Playas Gon Play’ when she wrote her 2014 hit.

The claim is mainly based on the similarities between the two songs’ respective key lines, with the 2001 track having the line “the playas gon play/them haters gonna hate”, while ‘Shake It Off’ famously includes the lyric “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate”.Swift’s legal team have been trying very hard to get the case dismissed, mainly on the basis that the notion of players playing and haters hating is far too generic for lyrics based on said notion to be protected by copyright in isolation.

More recently the Swift side has also gone to great lengths to explain how she couldn’t possibly have heard ‘Playas Gon Play’ before writing ‘Shake It Off’, because she never watched MTV and was mainly into country music when the former was released.The judge overseeing the case, Michael W Fitzgerald, did actually initially dismiss it, agreeing that lyrics about players playing and haters hating were too banal to enjoy copyright protection.

But that decision was overturned on appeal, and ever since Fitzgerald has seemed very reluctant indeed to rule on the key copyright arguments at the heart of the dispute, reckoning that the appeals court ruling means those matters have to go to a jury.Still, that hasn’t stopped Team Swift trying to persuade Fitzgerald to kick the case.