Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler have agreed to drop a lawsuit against Taylor Swift over her hit “Shake It Off.”
The pair asked Judge Michael W. Fitzgerald to dismiss the case, which he agreed to do on Monday. No reason was disclosed and it is not known if there was a settlement.
Hall and Butler sued Swift in 2017 alleging that she copied lyrics from “Playas Gon’ Play,” which was released by 3LW in 2001 and includes the line “haters, they gonna hate.” On her 2014 hit, Swift sings: “‘Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play and the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”
Swift’s lawyers argued that Hall and Butler can’t “monopolize the idea that players will play and haters will hate” and pointed out the phrases are “public domain clichés.”
Fitzgerald dismissed the lawsuit in 2019 but a federal appeals court reversed his ruling. He later said the claim is “not factually spurious or farfetched.”
Then, exactly one year ago, Fitzgerald refused another application from Swift’s lawyer to toss out the case and said it would go to trial. “Even though there are some noticeable differences between the works, there are also significant similarities in word usage and sequence/structure,” he ruled.
Days later, Swift's lawyers tried again to have the lawsuit dismissed. “The presence of versions of the two short public domain statements and two other tautologies in both songs – a commonality that the court has noted – simply does not satisfy the extrinsic test,” they argued. “Otherwise, plaintiffs could sue everyone who writes, sings, or publicly says ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate’ alone with other tautologies.
“To permit that is unprecedented and cheats the public domain.”
On Monday, Fitzgerald dismissed the lawsuit with prejudice, which means Hall and Butler can’t re-file it.