A federal judge has dismissed a copyright lawsuit against Taylor Swift over the lyrics of her hit song "Shake It Off," resolving a legal battle that has been dragged through the courts for five years.
Back in 2017, songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler filed a complaint claiming that Swift copied the lyrics from their 2001 song "Playas Gon' Play," which was released by R&B group 3LW, but did not give any credit, according to Billboard. Swift's single, "Shake It Off," was released on her album "1989" in 2014 and spent several weeks on top of the Billboard Hot 100 chart.
On Monday, in a joint filing in California federal court, attorneys for both parties asked a judge for an order "dismissing this action in its entirety," Billboard noted. Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald signed the order dismissing the lawsuit. According to The Wall Street Journal, it read; "pursuant to the parties' stipulation, this action is hereby dismissed, in its entirety and with prejudice."
The public filings did not include any specific terms of the apparent settlement.
In their original filing, Hall and Butler claimed Swift lifted the line from their song that states "playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate." In Swift's "Shake It Off" song, she sings, "Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate."
In the ensuing years, Swift's attorneys have repeatedly pushed to dismiss the case. Their argument is that the lyric in question was not enough to be covered in copyrights. It was on those grounds that, in 2018, Swift won a decision dismissing the case but an appeals court later overruled that decision with a judge ultimately ruling last year that the case would need to be decided by a jury trial.
"Even though there are some noticeable differences between the works, there are also significant similarities in word usage and sequence/structure," the judge wrote at the time, according to Billboard.