Every time you think lawyers can't get more ridiculous with these absurd music copyright lawsuits, they say, "Hold my craft beer."
Taylor Swift — a character I didn't expect to be so recurring in these posts but always seems to be ripe for content — is getting sued since she allegedly stole the line "'Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play / And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate" in her song "Shake It Off" from the 2001 song "Playas Gon' Play" by R&B trio 3LW, which includes the line "Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate."
Give me a freaking break.
3LW did not invent the phrase "Players gonna play," nor did they invent the phrase "Haters gonna hate." Saying they're "public domain phrases" even feels too tense. They're just common sayings. No one has a legal ownership of these, and I would find it incredibly hard to believe that 3LW was the first group to ever think of putting these sayings next to each other. If we were talking a string of four or five lines in common between the two songs, then the conversation might be a little different. But two lines, neither of which contain any remotely unique language? Come on.
And if you're 3LW, isn't it just embarrassing to prosecute this? By doing so, you have to argue, "My value as an artist is stored in taking two common sayings and putting them back-to-back." Is this the hill you want to die on as an artist? That the extent of your genius is in pancaking two idioms together? Combining two idioms and calling yourself an artist is no less crazy to me than jamming two Legos together and calling yourself an architect. I'm not trying to take 3LW's "artist card" away from them, as I know their career was much more colorful and inspired than this lawsuit makes it sound. But when you make a legal claim against a song like this, you're sort of setting the lower bound for what your artistry really is, and 3LW is setting their bound ridiculously low.
We're going down a troubling path here with music industry lawsuits where it feels like any scent of influence is flagged and criminalized. The "Blurred Lines" case decided that the "feel" and "groove" of a song is legally proprietary. The "Thinking Out Loud" case could at some point decide that the chord progression of a song is legally proprietary (even when the chord progression in question is one of the most basic in pop music). If this "Shake It Off" case rules that you can't say two everyday phrases consecutively if they've been said consecutively before, we're setting a horrible precedent that could open the floodgates to an entire barrage of similarly stupid lawsuits and systematically dismantle the entire genre of mumble rap, which is only built upon approximately seven different phrases in the first place.
On second thought, maybe this lawsuit might not be so bad after all.
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