A copyright lawsuit against Taylor Swift alleging she stole the lyrics of her 2014 song Shake It Off has been revived.
The lawsuit, filed in September 2017, had been dismissed in February 2018 by U.S. judge Michael Fitzgerald, who ruled the phrases in question were not sufficiently original to merit copyright protection.
A federal appeals court reversed the decision on Oct. 28 and is sending it back to U.S. district court for consideration, according to Variety.
READ MORE: Taylor Swift ‘Shake It Off’ copyright lawsuit dismissed by judge
In September 2017, songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler said in a copyright infringement lawsuit filed in federal court in Los Angeles that Swift’s song was based on the phrase “players, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate,” which they coined for a 2001 song Playas Gon’ Play by R&B girl group 3LW.
The Swift lyrics in question from her 2014 song Shake It Off were, “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play, and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
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Lawyers for Swift asked Fitzgerald in January to dismiss the case.
“The lynchpin of this entire case is thus whether or not the lyrics ‘Playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate’ are eligible for protection,” he wrote.
“In order for such short phrases to be protected under the Copyright Act, they must be more creative than the lyrics at issue here,” Fitzgerald ruled, according to court papers.
Hall and Butler did not allege Swift’s song stole musical elements, the judge said, and phrases about players and haters existed in pop culture before 2001.
“In the early 2000s, popular culture was adequately suffused with the concepts of players and haters to render the phrases ‘playas… gonna play’ or ‘haters… gonna hate,’ standing on their own, no more creative than ‘runners gonna run’; ‘drummers gonna drum’; or ‘swimmers gonna swim,’” Fitzgerald wrote.
READ MORE: Taylor Swift sued over ‘Shake It Off’ lyrics again
“The concept of actors acting in accordance with their essential nature is not at all creative; it is banal. … In short, combining two truisms about playas and haters, both well-worn notions as of 2001, is simply not enough.
“In sum, the lyrics at issue … are too brief, unoriginal, and uncreative to warrant protection under the Copyright Act.”
A three-judge panel from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reinstated the lawsuit on Monday.
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The judges reversed Fitzgerald’s decision, citing a 1903 ruling by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes regarding judgement about artistic worth, according to USA Today.
“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 in 1903. “At the one extreme, some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. … At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge.”
Swift has not commented on the reversal of the copyright lawsuit.
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