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Taylor Swift and her legal team can finally “shake it off.”
Two songwriters and Taylor Swift came to a decision to drop the lawsuit Monday after a five-year legal battle that claimed Swift had lifted the lyrics for her hit “Shake It Off,” reported Variety.
Swift and songwriters Nathan Butler and Sean Hall — who were scheduled to go to face off at trial next month — asked the judge to “[dimiss] this action in its entirety.”
Exact terms of the settlement are still unclear but, for now, the credits on the song — Swift and original co-writers Max Martin and Shellback — remain unchanged.
The Post has reached out to representatives for Swift for comment.
The “Bad Blood” began in 2017 when Butler and Hall claimed that her 2014 song’s lyrics are identical to their song “Playas Gon’ Play,” which was performed by the girl group 3LW and peaked at No. 18 on the Billboard charts in 2001.
“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,” said Swift in a filing.
Swift claimed that she would not have heard the song during its popularity as her parents “did not permit me to watch (MTV’s hit countdown show) ‘TRL’ until I was about 13 years old.”
Swift and her attorneys argued that the similar phrasing came from everyday language and popular vernacular.
“I recall hearing phrases about players play and haters hate stated together by other children while attending school in Wyomissing Hills, and in high school in Hendersonville,” said the Pennsylvania-born “Love Story” singer.
“These phrases were akin to other commonly used sayings like, ‘Don’t hate the playa, hate the game,’ ‘Take a chill pill,’ and ‘Say it, don’t spray it,’ she continued. “I was struck by messages that people prone to doing something will do it, and the best way to overcome it is to shrug it off and keep living.”
It should be noted the only similarities in both songs seem to be “Playas, they gonna play / And haters, they gonna hate” in the 3LW song and “Cause the players gonna play, play, play, play, play / And the haters gonna hate, hate, hate, hate, hate” in Swift’s tune.
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