Taylor Swift’s 2014 hit song “Shake it Off” is headed back to court after a lawsuit against it was reinstated by a federal appeals court on Monday, according to USA Today.
The original lawsuit, which was filed by songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler in 2017, claimed that Swift took lyrics from Hall’s 2001 song “Playas Gon’ Play,” Rolling Stone reported.
The lawsuit claimed that Swift’s use of the lyrics, “Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play/And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate,” was copyright infringement on Hall’s song, which includes the lyrics, “The playas gon’ play/Them haters gonna hate,” according to USA Today.
The case was dismissed by U.S. District Court Judge Michael Fitzgerald in 2018 based on what he considered a lack of originality in the lyrics, according to The Hollywood Reporter.
“Combining two truisms about playas and haters, both well-worn notions as of 2001, is simply not enough,” Fitzgerald wrote, according to The Hollywood Reporter, adding, “In sum, the lyrics at issue — the only thing that Plaintiffs allege Defendants copied — are too brief, unoriginal, and uncreative to warrant protection under the Copyright Act.”
However, a panel of three judges from the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the decision on Monday, referencing a 1903 ruling from Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes about judgments regarding art, according to USA Today.
“It would be a dangerous undertaking for persons trained only to the law to constitute themselves final judges of the worth of pictorial illustrations, outside of the narrowest and most obvious limits,” Holmes wrote, according to USA Today. “At the one extreme, some works of genius would be sure to miss appreciation. … At the other end, copyright would be denied to pictures which appealed to a public less educated than the judge.”
The appeals court found that the original ruling put the district court in the position of judging the artistic worth of the songs in question, which is why they reversed the decision.
“By concluding that, ‘for such short phrases to be protected under the Copyright Act, they must be more creative than the lyrics at issues here,’ the district court constituted itself as the final judge of the worth of an expressive work,” the appeals court wrote, according to Rolling Stone. “Because the absence of originality is not established either on the face of the complaint or through the judicially noticed matters, we reverse the district court’s dismissal.”
Based on the new ruling, the case will now be sent back to U.S. District Court, according to USA Today.
Huff sent a statement to Rolling Stone about the update in the case.
“We are happy the court unanimously sided with us. We simply refuse to sit still and have our creative work be culturally appropriated as if it never existed. This case is giving voice to all of those creatives who can’t afford to stand up and protect their work in the face of well-financed Goliaths.”