The Daily Mail reported on Dec. 10 that Taylor Swift, a 31-year-old American singer, was indicted by two composers. They claim that Taylor's 2014 hit "Shake It Off" copied the lyrics of the girl group 3LW's 2001 song "Playas Gon'Play."
U.S. District Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald allowed the case to go to trial after ruling that a jury might have found her plagiarizing the lyrics.
The two composers initially filed a lawsuit in 2017, but it was dismissed. At the time, the judge held that the lyrics "players gonna play and haters gonna hate" had similar versions in many songs, and similar plots were too common to be counted as copyright infringement.
At the same time, he listed 13 songs from the past few decades, all of which contained similar lyrics, and the lyrics of the complaint were plagiarized and too brief to be protected by the Copyright Act.
But the two composers appealed against the rejection. It wasn't until 2019 that a federal court overturned the original verdict, ruling that Judge Fitzgerald should not have rejected the verdict and sending the case back to him.
Judge Fitzgerald wrote in his own opinion that although there are some obvious differences between the two works, there are also significant similarities in lexical usage and order/structure.
He added: "Now the court jury cannot find substantial similarities in the lyrics of the two songs. "But by law, Taylor Swift still needs to appear in court, and the timing of the trial has not yet been determined."