Taylor Swift has spent her life putting her feelings into words.
And despite a lawsuit by poet Kimberly Marasco, who claimed that some of Swift’s lyrics infringed the copyright of her poetry, a federal judge dismissed Marasco’s lawsuit and allowed Swift to dismiss her case completely.
In a ruling obtained by E! News on July 6, U.S. District Judge Eileen M. Cannon held that “the allegedly infringed material, including the basic idea, theme, metaphor, isolated word, or short phrase, is not protected expression and cannot be infringed.”
Additionally, to prove copyright infringement, a plaintiff must provide direct evidence of copying by showing that “(a) the defendant had access to her copyrighted work, and (b) that the copyrighted work is ‘…substantially similar enough that an average lay observer would recognize that the alleged copy was appropriated from the original work.'”
But in this case, the court ruled that Marasco “failed to make any plausible claim of either access or substantial similarity, each independently required to claim reproduction.”
