Taylor Swift files request to dismiss lawsuit of ‘stolen’ ‘Shake It Off’ lyrics

Award-winning singer and songwriter Taylor Swift requests courts to have the Shake It Off lyric allegation dismissed.

For those unversed, this clap back has gone into motion after the singer was accused of stealing the lyrics of her Shake It Off from 3LW’s song Playas Gon’ Play.

The singer’s legal team has even approached Judge Michael Fitzgerald of the US District Court for the Central District of California to reconsider the decision to refuse.

According to Page Six, Swift’s attorney Pete Anderson spoke out about it all and claimed, “Plaintiffs could sue everyone who writes, sings, or publicly says ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate’.”

He even went on to claim that the lyrics are in the public domain and are “unprotected” and thus “To permit that is unprecedented and cheats the public domain.”

This lawsuit was initially filed back in 2017 by Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, and they believe Taylor copied their lyric, “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate.”

The court document also goes on to state, “It is essential to distinguish between the protected and unprotected material in a plaintiff’s work.”

“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.”

“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.”