Taylor Swift has defended herself as the only author of her 2014 hit Shake It Off in response to a lawsuit claiming that she plagiarised lyrics from the 2000 track Playas Gon’ Play by woman group 3LW.
“The lyrics to Shake It Off had been written totally by me,” Swift acknowledged in a sworn declaration filed on Monday. “Till studying about Plaintiffs’ declare in 2017, I had by no means heard the track Playas Gon’ Play and had by no means heard of that track or the group 3LW.”
Playas Gon’ Play songwriters Sean Corridor and Nathan Butler filed the copyright go well with in 2017, citing similarities between the strains “playas gonna play” and “haters gonna hate”.
It was dismissed in 2018, with a choose commenting that the lyrics had been “too banal” to be copied, however resurrected by an attraction panel in 2021.
In December, a choose refused Swift’s request to dismiss the case, citing “sufficient goal similarities” between the 2 songs for a jury to settle the matter.
“Our purchasers are lastly transferring nearer to the justice they so richly deserve,” their lawyer Marina Bogorad mentioned on the time. “The opinion … is particularly gratifying to them as a result of it reinforces the concept their creativity and distinctive expression can't be misappropriated with none retribution.”
In writing the lyrics, Swift acknowledged in her movement, she drew partly on “experiences in my life and, specifically, unrelenting public scrutiny of my private life, ‘clickbait’ reporting, public manipulation, and different types of damaging private criticism which I discovered I simply wanted to shake off and deal with my music.”
Having began out as a rustic artist, Swift had grow to be a mainstream pop star after the discharge of her 2012 album, Crimson, which introduced with it intensive tabloid hypothesis about her private and romantic life.
Swift continued: “With Shake It Off, I needed to supply a comedic, empowering method to serving to folks really feel higher about damaging criticism by means of music, dance, and the non-public independence enabling one to simply shake off the damaging criticism.”
The lyrics additionally drew from what she known as “generally used phrases and feedback heard” all through her life, together with “gamers gonna play” and “haters gonna hate”, her consciousness of which stemmed again to her faculty days.
She denied the potential for having heard the 3LW track, which reached No 81 on the US Billboard charts, in any type of media or social setting. She acknowledged that her dad and mom didn't permit her to look at MTV’s Whole Request Reside till she was “about 13 years outdated”: the 3LW hit first appeared on an album in 2000, when Swift was 10.
Her mom, Andrea Swift, additionally filed a press release saying that she “fastidiously monitored each the tv [Swift] watched and the music she heard” in addition to the shared house pc. “Taylor didn't attend sleepovers at buddies’ homes as a younger woman as a result of we lived on a farm till she was 10 years outdated and I all the time most popular having buddies come over to our house.”
Within the new movement, Swift’s lawyer, Peter Anderson, wrote: “It's, sadly, common for successful track to be met by litigants hoping for a windfall based mostly on tenuous claims that their very own track was copied. However even in opposition to that background, Plaintiffs’ declare stands proud as notably baseless.”
Following publication, Corridor and Butler mentioned in a press release: “That is defendants’ fourth try to make these claims go away, so defendants’ labelling them as baseless rings hole at this level.
“The legislation doesn't imagine in pure coincidences, particularly the place, as right here, the 2 works are so strikingly related that Ms Taylor’s denial of entry makes no distinction to the result.
“Plaintiffs are assured that there are considerable factual points for his or her claims to succeed in the jury, as it's not as much as the courtroom to weigh in on credibility points or crown the winner within the battle of the consultants.”
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