Musician Taylor Swift is back in the center of a copyright legal battle over her 2014 song “Shake It Off.”
A federal appeals court revived a previously dismissed copyright lawsuit against Swift on Monday, according to a report published by Rolling Stone.
Haters gonna hate. The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals have revived a copyright lawsuit against Taylor Swift’s mega-hit “Shake It Off” https://t.co/fVkPqXv7Kx
— Hollywood Reporter (@THR) October 29, 2019
The original lawsuit was filed by songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler. The pair claimed Swift copied the lyrics from their 2001 song “Playas Gon’ Play.”
Both songs include the phrases “playas gonna play” and “haters gonna hate.” However, a U.S. District court judge dismissed the case in February of 2018.
“By 2001, American popular culture was heavily steeped in the concepts of players, haters, and player haters,” Judge Michael Fitzgerald said at the time. “The concept of actors acting in accordance with their essential nature is not at all creative; it is banal.” (RELATED: Jury Selection Begins In Taylor Swift Groping Trial)
Three judges on the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has reinstated the copyright lawsuit against Swift citing a ruling by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes in 1903.
“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,” Holmes wrote at the time of the ruling. “At the one extreme, some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. Their very novelty would make them repulsive until the public had learned the new language in which their author spoke.”