The wedding presents just keep on coming. Three days after Taylor Swift‘s marriage to Travis Kelce, a federal judge dismissed with prejudice a lawsuit filed 14 months ago by a little-known Florida poet who claimed that the superstar copied phrases from her poems in more than a dozen songs.
United States District Judge Aileen Cannon, who has become a bit of a celebrity herself in recent years, ruled against plaintiff Kimberly Marasco and in favor of defendants Swift, Aaron Dessner, Republic Records and Universal Music Group. In the document dismissing the case, Cannon concluded “that Plaintiff’s poems do not contain protectable expression and that, regardless, Plaintiff has failed to plausibly plead copying.”
Cannon noted that Marasco conceded that one of the poetry books she published had sold only about 3,000 copies globally, and that none of them were being actively promoted. Cannon singled out some of the instances in which Marasco claimed her poetry ended up in Swift’s lyrics, writing that it was a stretch to imagine the lines had enough similarity to make a plausible assumption Swift or her co-defendants had seen the books — but that there still would not be a case even if the singer had been proven to find inspiration in the poet’s ideas.
Wrote Cannon, “Count I alleges that Defendants’ song ‘The Man’ (containing the lyric ‘I’m so sick of running as fast as I can / Wondering if I’d get there quicker if I was a man’) infringes Plaintiff’s poem ‘Ordinary Citizen’ (‘I’m running behind / You say its His word against mine’) because both describe a woman working in a male-dominated office environment. Count X alleges that ‘The Great War’ (‘Diesel is desire, you were playing with fire”) infringes “The Fire” (‘Anger fuels our desire . . . I’m fighting fire with fire’) because both use the metaphor of ‘desire as fuel and fire.’ Similar allegations populate the remaining counts,” Cannon wrote, unconvinced by Marasco’s allegations.
“In sum, none of Plaintiff’s twelve counts identifies any protected expression. Although that conclusion is sufficient to require dismissal, the Court proceeds to the next step because Plaintiff’s independent failure to plead copying further confirms that dismissal is warranted.” Cannon cites a recently amended version of the complaint as still “contain(ing) no allegations of direct evidence of copying, Plaintiff must show both (a) that Defendants had access to her works and (b) that the works are ‘o substantially similar . . . that an average lay observer would recognize the alleged copy as having been appropriated from the original work.’ … These elements are conjunctive: the failure of either independently defeats a claim of copying… For the new allegations…, the works are not even substantially similar — a point Plaintiff effectively concedes by characterizing the alleged copying as ‘paraphrase[s],’ ‘rephrase[s],’ and copying with ‘minor word substitutions.’ Admitted differences of that kind cannot satisfy the substantial-similarity standard.
The defendants had called Marasco’s lawsuit “shotgun pleading,” and the judge agreed, saying the amended complaint “likely qualifies as a shotgun pleading because it ‘assert[s] multiple claims against multiple defendants without specifying which of the defendants are responsible for which acts or omissions.’ Plaintiff refers to the three Defendants collectively throughout her infringement allegations despite the distinct roles an artist, a record label, and a parent company occupy in the music industry, and several counts bundle multiple songs and multiple poems together.”
One of the plaintiff’s three books, “Swift Reflections: Poetry Inspirations,” went into detail about her allegations that the singer had lifted ideas from her work.
Judge Cannon had been in the news earlier this year for rejecting a press effort to force the release of Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report about President Trump holding onto classified documents at Mar-a-lago after his first term. Cannon was appointed by Trump in 2020 to serve as a U.S. District Judge for the Southern District of Florida. She has been brought up as a possibility for the Supreme Court if Trump gets to select another new member during his second term.