A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit claiming Taylor Swift stole lyrics for 15 of her songs from a self-published Florida poet, ruling the accuser was trying to claim ownership over basic ideas and “common words.”
Kimberly Marasco sued Swift’s company last year over allegations that more than a dozen of the star’s songs — spanning the albums Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department — ripped off copyrighted material from two books of poetry.
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But in a ruling Monday, Judge Aileen Cannon thoroughly rejected those claims. She ruled that Swift likely never saw the poems, that her lyrics were not similar to them, and, most crucially, that Marasco didn’t even own any rights to the “common” phrases she claimed Swift had copied.
“Plaintiff’s poems amount at most to ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes — none of which is a proper subject of copyright protection,” the judge wrote.
The lawsuit cited the fact that Swift’s lyrics included some of the same words as Marasco’s poems, including “tears,” “yelling,” “running,” “fear,” “time,” “rain,” “sky,” “waves,” “cruel,” “mean,” “desire,” “love,” and “invisible.” But in her ruling, Judge Cannon said that’s not at all how copyright law works.
“Plaintiff’s attempt to protect various words is equally unavailing,” the judge wrote. “These common words alone are not copyrightable.”
The ruling is not quite the end for Marasco’s litigation. Though it dismissed claims against the star’s Taylor Swift Productions, Marasco also filed a separate case against Swift herself earlier this year. But that case now faces long odds: It is essentially over the same accusations, and it’s currently pending before the same judge.
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Marasco filed her lawsuit last year, claiming the superstar had stolen material for lyrics in songs from Lover, Folklore, Evermore, Midnights and The Tortured Poets Department. In court filings, Swift’s lawyers have called the case “utterly baseless” and based on “short phrases plucked from random spots.”
In one 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 still talk to you/when I’m screaming at the sky”; in Marasco’s poem, the words are: “The dark evil entity Devoured in the Fire/Doves dancing and singing high in the sky, and I can hear the beautiful choir.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Judge Cannon ruled Monday that she didn’t see much resemblance. She said Marasco had “fallen woefully short” of proving that Swift’s words were “substantially similar” to her own — the test courts use to decide copyright cases: “None of Plaintiff’s thirteen claims plausibly alleges an objective substantial similarity between Defendant’s songs and Plaintiff’s poems.”
Even if the songs had been closely similar, the judge ruled that Marasco still would have had no right to sue over such “noncopyrightable material” — common themes and ideas that nobody gets to own. She pointed to the lawsuit’s claim that Swift had misappropriated Marasco’s poem about “a woman being gaslighted and attacked.”
“To the extent that some similarities in the words and general themes exist between Defendant’s songs and Plaintiff’s poems, those commonalities are not … protectable expressions,” Judge Cannon wrote.
Both Marasco and a representative for Swift did not immediately return requests for comment on Monday (Sept. 29).
