Taylor Swift’s Case Headed Back to Court: ‘Shake It Off’ Copyright Claim

By Puza Sarker Snigdha
A federal court has reopened the case which accused superstar Taylor Swift of plagiarising the chorus of her song “Shake It Off”.
The lawsuit has reopened on Monday which was issued in 2017 and dismissed in February 2018 by a federal judge in California.
Lyricist Sean Hall and Nathan Butler claim that Swift has taken the lyrics from their 2001 composition “Playas Gon’ Play,” which used to be performed by the girl neighborhood 3LW.
The ‘Shake It Off’ song’s questioned lines are: “Trigger the gamers gonna play, play, play, play, play/ And the haters gonna abominate, abominate, abominate, abominate, abominate / Exiguous one, I’m upright gonna shake, shake, shake, shake, shake I shake it off, I shake it off.”
In February of last year, a district court decided that there was not enough similarity between “Shake It Off” and “Playas Gon’ Play” which can call plagiarism. Judge Michael Fitzgerald said that “the authors’ use of certain phrases in “Playas Gon’ Play,” such as “playas gonna play” and “haters gonna hate,” was not unique enough to warrant copyright protection”.
However, a three-judge board called a 2018 end in government court untimely and referred to a decision by Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that brought up issues about the capacity of a judge–talented in law–to control over an imaginative case.
“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,” said Holmes.
In recent years, many noted musicians have confronted comparable suits as Swift, with altogether different outcomes.