In her upcoming copyright trial for “Shake It Off,” Taylor Swift’s attorneys are pleading with a federal judge to throw out several “unqualified” expert witnesses, including one they say is “just making it up as he goes along.”
Swift is finally due for a jury trial in January following more than five years of litigation over claims that she plagiarised the main lyrics to her chart-topping hit from a 2001 song called “Playas Gon’ Play” by the group 3LW. Although the judge presiding over the case has so far refrained from dismissing it, the pop artist and her attorneys claim the case is seriously defective.
Each side will extensively rely on expert testimony during those impending sessions to present their case to the jury. However, Swift’s attorneys said in a court document on Monday (Sept. 5) that some of her accusers’ specialists had the necessary credentials to render an opinion on the matters at hand, including one who they claimed was making “unsupported, solely subjective, and irrelevant assertions.”
Swift’s attorneys said that the man “clearly lacks the qualifications to deliver that or any of the other opinions he has voiced in this matter, and his deposition testimony reveals he is simply making it up as he goes along.”
In a statement to Billboard on Wednesday, an attorney for Swift’s accusers labelled the request as lawsuit gamesmanship: Olga Viner of the law firm Gerard Fox stated that the defendants “just file mountains of material to never face the merits in this case.” “We anticipate that the court will recognise this as a ruse.”
The lawsuit against Swift was brought in 2017 by “Playas Gon’ Play” songwriters Sean Hall and Nathan Butler. “Playas, they going to play” and “Haters, they going to hate” were the lyrics from their 2001 song; in Swift’s version, she sings, “‘Cause the players going to play, play, play, play, and the Haters going to hate, hate, hate, hate, hate.”