Swift trying to shake off new lawsuit
Taylor Swift is being sued over the lyrics to Shake It Off.
The 27-year-old singer has been hit by a lawsuit by songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler, who claim the lyrics to her 2014 track are not original and have been copied from their 2001 song Playas Gon’ Play, which was recorded by girl group 3LW and reached number 81 on the Billboard chart, TMZ reports.
The lyrics to their song include: “Playas, they gonna play and haters, they gonna hate.”
And Shake It Off’s chorus includes the line: “Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/ And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
A spokesperson for Swift — who co-wrote the track with Max Martin and Shellback — has slammed the lawsuit as “ridiculous” and a “money grab”.
“This is a ridiculous claim and nothing more than a money grab. They do not have a case.”
This isn’t the first time Swift has been hit with a lawsuit over the song.
In November 2015, a judge in California dismissed a US$42 million ($57m) claim from singer Jesse Graham, who had accused the Look What You Made Me Do singer of stealing his lyric “haters gonna hate”.
And in his dismissal of the lawsuit, US Magistrate Judge F. Standish quoted Swift’s popular single.
He ruled: “Upon consideration of the Court’s explanation in Part II, Graham may discover that mere pleading Band-Aids will not fix the bullet holes in this case. At least for the moment, Defendants have shaken off this lawsuit.”