The 'Bad Blood' songstress currently battles a separate plagiarism lawsuit over lyrics of her hit song 'Shake It Off', recently claiming that she wrote the lyrics 'entirely' on her own.
- Aug 25, 2022
AceShowbiz - Taylor Swift has got bad blood with an author named Teresa La Dart. The 32-year-old Grammy-winning singer/songstress is facing a new copyright lawsuit over her 2019 book titled "Lover".
In a complaint filed on Tuesday, August 23, Teresa accused the "All Too Well" performer of stealing her "design and textual elements" and ripping off her tome of "poems, anecdotes and photos," per TMZ. Teresa added that the country-turned-pop star's book, which sold 2.9 million copies in the U.S. alone, infringes her copyrights.
Teresa claimed the books are "substantially the same format of a recollection of past years memorialized in a combination of written and pictorial components." The alleged similarities include covers that both feature "pastel pinks and blues," as well as an image of the author "photographed in a downward pose."
In the court documents, Teresa added that the inner book design, specifically the "interspersed photographs and writings," also infringed her copyrights. Teresa stated that Taylor now owes her in "excess of one million dollars" in damages.
Taylor is currently embroiled in another copyright lawsuit over her hit song "Shake It Off". Songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler have claimed that the "Bad Blood" songstress used lines from their 2001 tune "Playas Gon' Play", including "playas gonna play" and "haters gonna hate," which was performed by the girl group 3LW. The suit, which was first filed in 2017, was dismissed but has been reopened on appeal.
In a sworn deposition, Taylor denied stealing any lyrics. "The lyrics to 'Shake It Off' were written entirely by me," she stated on August 8. "Until learning about Plaintiffs' claim in 2017, I had never heard the song 'Playas Gon' Play' and had never heard of that song or the group 3LW."
In writing the lyrics, Taylor wrote in her motion, she drew partly on "experiences in my life and, in particular, unrelenting public scrutiny of my personal life, 'clickbait' reporting, public manipulation, and other forms of negative personal criticism which I learned I just needed to shake off and focus on my music."
Taylor also insisted that the lyrics drew from what she called "commonly used phrases and comments heard" throughout her life, including "players gonna play" and "haters gonna hate," her awareness of which stemmed back to her school days.
In the new motion, Taylor's lawyer, Peter Anderson slammed the "baseless" accusations. He stated, "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."
