Though the lawsuit was initially dismissed in 2018, it was refiled in 2021. Per People, in response to the lawsuit being filed again, Taylor Swift wrote in her declaration: “Prior to writing ‘Shake It Off,’ I had heard the phrases ‘players gonna play’ and ‘haters gonna hate’ uttered countless times to express the idea that one can or should shrug off negativity.”
Moreover, per The Guardian, Swift’s lawyer Peter Anderson also heavily dismissed the claims. “It is, unfortunately, not unusual for a hit song to be met by litigants hoping for a windfall based on tenuous claims that their own song was copied. But even against that background, Plaintiffs’ claim sticks out as particularly baseless,” he stated in a new motion.
Thankfully, among the many Taylor Swift eras, a lawsuit era was not to be. Before it went to trial in January 2023, the case was dismissed fully in December 2022, meaning Sean Hall and Nathan Butler cannot file another lawsuit relating to the lyrics as they did the second time round.
