Taylor Swift Lawsuit Dismissed: Judge Rules Star Didn’t Copy Poems for Her Song Lyrics

A national justice has dismissed a suit claiming Taylor Swift stole lyrics for 15 of her songs from a self-published Florida poet, ruling the accuser was trying to assertion ownership implicit basal ideas and “common words.”

Kimberly Marasco sued Swift’s institution past twelvemonth implicit allegations that much than a twelve of the star’s songs — spanning the albums Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department — ripped disconnected copyrighted worldly from 2 books of poetry.

But successful a ruling Monday, Judge Aileen Cannon thoroughly rejected those claims. She ruled that Swift apt ne'er saw the poems, that her lyrics were not akin to them, and, astir crucially, that Marasco didn’t adjacent ain immoderate rights to the “common” phrases she claimed Swift had copied.

“Plaintiff’s poems magnitude astatine astir to ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes — nary of which is simply a due taxable of copyright protection,” the justice wrote.

The suit cited the information that Swift’s lyrics included immoderate of the aforesaid words arsenic Marasco’s poems, including “tears,” “yelling,” “running,” “fear,” “time,” “rain,” “sky,” “waves,” “cruel,” “mean,” “desire,” “love,” and “invisible.” But successful her ruling, Judge Cannon said that’s not astatine each however copyright instrumentality works.

“Plaintiff’s effort to support assorted words is arsenic unavailing,” the justice wrote. “These communal words unsocial are not copyrightable.”

The ruling is not rather the extremity for Marasco’s litigation. Though it dismissed claims against the star’s Taylor Swift Productions, Marasco besides filed a abstracted lawsuit against Swift herself earlier this year. But that lawsuit present faces agelong odds: It is fundamentally implicit the aforesaid accusations, and it’s presently pending earlier the aforesaid judge.

Marasco filed her suit past year, claiming the superstar had stolen worldly for lyrics successful songs from Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department. In tribunal filings, Swift’s lawyers person called the lawsuit “utterly baseless” and based connected “short phrases plucked from random spots.”

In 1 alleged infringement, she claimed Swift’s “My Tears Ricochet” was copied from her poem “Beams of Light.” In Swift’s song, the lyric reads: “And I inactive speech to you/when I’m screaming astatine the sky”; successful Marasco’s poem, the words are: “The acheronian evil entity Devoured successful the Fire/Doves dancing and singing precocious successful the sky, and I tin perceive the beauteous choir.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Judge Cannon ruled Monday that she didn’t spot overmuch resemblance. She said Marasco had “fallen woefully short” of proving that Swift’s words were “substantially similar” to her ain — the trial courts usage to determine copyright cases: “None of Plaintiff’s thirteen claims plausibly alleges an nonsubjective important similarity betwixt Defendant’s songs and Plaintiff’s poems.”

Even if the songs had been intimately similar, the justice ruled that Marasco inactive would person had nary close to writer implicit specified “noncopyrightable material” — communal themes and ideas that cipher gets to own. She pointed to the lawsuit’s assertion that Swift had misappropriated Marasco’s poem astir “a pistillate being gaslighted and attacked.”

“To the grade that immoderate similarities successful the words and wide themes beryllium betwixt Defendant’s songs and Plaintiff’s poems, those commonalities are not … protectable expressions,” Judge Cannon wrote.

Both Marasco and a typical for Swift did not instantly instrumentality requests for remark connected Monday (Sept. 29).