After five years, the lawsuit filed against Taylor Swift‘s 2014 single “Shake It Off” has officially been dropped.
A judge dismissed the case earlier this week according to EW, preventing it from going to trial in January. The lawsuit was dismissed once before, but was appealed a year later and has been ongoing ever since.
Sean Hall and Nathan Butler originally filed the lawsuit in 2017, claiming specific lyrics from “Shake It Off” were copyright infringement. The duo wrote 3LW’s “Playas Gon’ Play,” released in 2000, which contains lyrics similar to “Shake It Off.”
While Swift’s single says “the players gonna play, play, play, play, play” and “the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” it was previously deemed to be too generic of a statement to be protected under legal copyright. 3LW’s “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate” lyrics may have come first, but neither technically copies the other.
So it appears Swift and “Shake It Off” are in the clear … which means there’s no reason the singer/songwriter can’t move forward with re-recording and releasing new versions of not just that single but the entire album as well. These “Taylor’s Version” albums allow her to legally own her music, the original masters of which still belong to her previous label. She offered to purchase them, but the label refused … for some reason.
While a 1989 (Taylor’s Version) will come eventually, Swifties are convinced Speak Now is next in the running for a re-recording. That doesn’t mean Shake It Off couldn’t get a second single treatment — it wouldn’t be the first song from the album to re-release with the Taylor’s Version label.
Swift seems to have a busy 2023 ahead, but who’s to say she’s not already working on reclaiming more of her old music as I’m writing this? More news to come, I suppose.
