Taylor Swift has scored a major legal victory just days after her wedding, with a federal judge dismissing a copyright lawsuit that had been hanging over her for more than a year.
United States District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled against plaintiff Kimberly Marasco on Tuesday, dismissing with prejudice her claim that Swift had copied phrases from her poems across more than a dozen songs.
The defendants, Swift, producer Aaron Dessner, Republic Records and Universal Music Group, prevailed on all counts.
In her ruling, Cannon was unsparing in her assessment of Marasco’s case, concluding that the plaintiff’s poems “do not contain protectable expression” and that Marasco had “failed to plausibly plead copying.”
The judge examined specific instances of the alleged infringement and found them unconvincing even as hypotheticals.
She noted, for example, that one count alleged Swift’s song The Man infringed Marasco’s poem Ordinary Citizen because both described a woman working in a male-dominated environment, and another claimed The Great War borrowed from a poem called The Fire because both used the metaphor of desire as fire.
Cannon was not persuaded.
The judge’s broader conclusion was that Marasco’s suit rested on “basic ideas and themes, ubiquitous metaphors, and isolated common words and short phrases”, none of which are eligible for copyright protection.
“Such content amount[s] at most to ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes, none of which is a proper subject of copyright protection,” Cannon wrote.
She also found that Marasco had failed to demonstrate that Swift or her co-defendants had ever had access to the poems, noting that one of Marasco’s poetry collections had sold approximately 3,000 copies globally and was not being actively promoted.
The judge further agreed with the defendants’ characterisation of the lawsuit as “shotgun pleading,” criticising the amended complaint for lumping together multiple songs, multiple poems and multiple defendants without specifying who was responsible for what.
The case had moved slowly through the courts, partly due to difficulty serving Swift with legal papers.
Musicologist Brian McBrearty, who has testified in music copyright cases, had predicted its dismissal in a December column, writing that “nothing in this matter is tethered to copyright law in any meaningful way” and that “courts can’t adjudicate vibes.”
For Swift, the ruling lands neatly, if coincidentally, in what has already been a landmark week.
