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Taylor Swift seeks to dismiss Shake It Off copyright suit
inger Taylor Swift’s lawyers have requested a federal judge to drop a copyright lawsuit against her, arguing that the phrase “players gonna play and haters gonna hate” is a cliche that should be in the public domain.
Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who co-wrote the track Playas Gon’ Play for the girl band 3LW filed a case against Swift, alleging lifting the lyrics from the song.
The chorus of 2001 song includes the phrase, ‘Playas, they gonna play, and haters, they gonna hate.’
Hall and Butler claimed that Swift’s 2014 song, Shake It Off, infringed on their lyrics with its chorus — ‘Players gonna play, play, play, play, play, and haters gonna hate, hate, hate, ctor Daisy Ridley says that she had received some great words of wisdom and advice from actor Carrie Fisher before she died in December 2016.
The 25-year-old actor shared screen space with Fisher in both Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and Star Wars: The Last Jedi (2017).
“Carrie Fisher said not to shrink away from the success but to enjoy it. And that was wonderful,” Ridley told Elle magazine. Fisher spoke to Ridley about the way stardom would impact her search for love, telling the actor that her personal life was set to become much more complicated.
She also told Ridley that her love life would become more difficult “because you don’t want to give people the ability to say ‘I had sex with Princess Leia’. hate, hate.’
According to Variety, the 28-year-old singer’s legal counsel moved to dismiss the case, saying, “There can be no copyright protection in ‘playas, they gonna play and haters, they gonna hate,’ because it would impermissibly monopolise the idea that players will play and haters will hate.”
The lawyers of the singer further added, “Plaintiffs’ claim to being the only ones in the world, who can refer to players playing and haters hating is frivolous... Providing a copyright monopoly in the phrase would prevent others from sharing the idea that players play and haters hate.”
The lawyers also said the phrase is one of the “public domain cliches” and argued that courts have consistently maintained that short phrases like these cannot be a subject to copyright. In a footnote, they also cited numerous other references to “players” and “haters” in pop culture, including the 1977 song Dreams by Fleetwood Mac.