Taylor Swift “can’t stop, won’t stop moving” until this lawsuit involving one of her biggest hits is over.
The superstar is asking a federal judge to cancel the jury trial regarding allegations that she stole the lyrics to her hit song “Shake It Off” from a pre-existing song about “playas” and “haters.”
In her latest legal filing, reports Billboard, Swift’s lawyers argued that the judge’s recent ruling over her was “unprecedented.”
READ MORE: Taylor Swift’s ‘Shake It Off’ Lawsuit Revived By U.S. Federal Appeals Court
Two weeks ago the court rejected Swift’s request to discard the lawsuit, claiming that the lyrics were taken from the 2001 song “Playas Gon’ Play” by the group 3LW. However, Swift’s attorneys pressed the judge to reconsider his own verdict, which judges only do in the rare occurrence that they’ve evidently made a mistake.
Swift’s attorneys warned that “no other court” had ever permitted a case like such to move on to trial, and explained their reasoning.
“Plaintiffs could sue everyone who writes, sings, or publicly says ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate,’” Swift’s attorney, Peter Anderson of the firm Davis Wright Tremaine LLP, wrote in a Dec. 23 motion. “To permit that is unprecedented and cheats the public domain.”
The case was filed against Swift in 2017 by “Playas Gon’ Play” songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler after “Shake It Off” debuted at No. 1 on the Billboard Hot 100 back in September 2014. It went on to spend four weeks at the top of the chart and ultimately spent 50 weeks on the Hot 100, where it tied with another Swift track, “You Belong With Me”, for her longest-charting single.
READ MORE: Taylor Swift ‘Shake It Off’ Copyright Lawsuit Dismissed By Judge
On Dec. 9, U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald denied Swift’s appeal to disregard the case and declared that it was too close to call, and would need to be determined by a jury of Swift’s peers.
“Even though there are some noticeable differences between the works, there are also significant similarities in word usage and sequence/structure,” Judge Fitzgerald specified at the time.
In the new filing requesting to overturn that ruling, Swift’s attorneys testified that Judge Fitzgerald has made a “clear error” in his examination. They specifically argued that he failed to administer copyright law’s supposed extrinsic test (the action where judges discard material that is not covered by copyrights before comparing the two songs).
“It is essential to distinguish between the protected and unprotected material in a plaintiff’s work,” Swift’s attorneys wrote, pulling direct quotes from the high-profile ruling that exinerated Led Zeppelin in a similar case alleging the band had ripped off the intro to “Stairway to Heaven” from “Taurus”, a song by the band Spirit.
“Doing so here leaves only this similarity: both works use versions of two short public domain phrases — ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate’ — that are free for everyone to use, and two other but different tautologies that plaintiffs claim share the same underlying general idea or concept,” Swifts attorneys continued. “The presence of versions of the two short public domain statements and two other tautologies in both songs … simply does not satisfy the extrinsic test.”
An attorney for Hall and Butler provided a statement to Billboard calling Swift’s act “groundless.”
“All it asks is for the court to reverse itself because Swift is unhappy with the ruling,” Marina Bogorad of the firm Gerard Fox Law said. “She raised these arguments before, and they were rejected. The precedent is clear that such motions are routinely denied because the rules are not designed to give an unhappy litigant one additional chance to sway the judge. We are confident the Court will adhere to this precedent here.”
