The case in the news today is a refiling, and I don’t think Musicologize even bothered to address it on the merits the first time. But since it’s back, let’s hit it quickly.
The only reason I’m giving it attention at all is to reassure: there’s nothing here. Some headlines might imply Swift escaped on a technicality or through overzealous personal security. No. Nothing in this matter is tethered to copyright law in any meaningful way.
It’s true that the first version of the lawsuit didn’t fail for the enduring reasons I’d have preferred; that a court had weighed the claims and found them shoddy. It failed because Marasco couldn’t properly serve Swift or some such series of technicalities. Reports at the time had the plaintiff or her servers bouncing off Swift’s security at multiple attempts. That doesn’t signal anything nefarious. It’s more what happens when a pro se plaintiff tries to serve a high-profile defendant. Swift has her detail for reasons.
And dag-nab-it. From the musicologist’s point of view, it’s mildly annoying when cases die on procedural clutter. Lawyers quite reasonably take the shortest path, but for me it always raises the same frustration: we burn time arguing about access or in this case service, when the real story sits in the musical material, or the lack of it. And here, the lack is the real and whole story.
After the procedurally doomed first shot, Marasco filed again and upped the stakes dramatically. She demanded at least twenty-five million dollars — a pretty goodly sum for a case that still hadn’t articulated any actual protectable expression supposedly taken from her. It reads like a headline grabber rather than a damages theory. The gap between ambition and viability becomes difficult to ignore.
And of course, once you get past the procedural noise and look at the allegations themselves, you see immediately why the service issues were almost merciful. This suit isn’t built on musical content but on the idea that Swift wrote something thematically adjacent to some poems or songs of the plaintiff’s. But no one owns themes, fortunately for Swift, especially, but for everyone else too. Uplifting commercial pop is practically a public utility at this point. Copyright isn’t meant to suppress that; it’s meant to incentivize creation, and it does that by protecting expression, not ideas. That’s the carrot. Variations of that point have been made here on Musicologize many, many times.
These filings offer no melodic details, nothing rhythmic, nothing harmonic or structural. Nothing that would interest a musicologist in any serious forensic sense. Those are the ingredients that matter. When they’re absent, the case is absent. And ideally we’d stop hearing about it. Courts can’t adjudicate vibes. They need claims rooted in authorship.
In fact, the service fiasco and the oversized damages demand both stem from the same problem: the plaintiff treats copyright as a moral grievance. You stole my message. You echoed my emotional state. I hear from people with that instinct all the time. A large part of my work is easing clients out of the belief that their feelings, themes, or philosophies are protectable. That they’ve been harmed. Copyright guards concrete choices: specific lyrical phrases, melody, rhythm, harmony, structure. Marasco and Swift share none of that.
So when the first case fell apart, headlines and people called it technical, the validity of which was, at best, technical in the sense that it barely existed as a copyright dispute. It certainly shouldn’t have spawned the kind of headlines we’ve seen, the “Did Taylor steal a poet’s work and avoid being served?” genre of clickbait. The procedural flaws simply reflected a claim that didn’t have the foundation to survive. Even with flawless service, even with immaculate paperwork, nothing in that complaint would have carried it into the realm of viable music copyright litigation.
Courts don’t award fees easily, and Swift likely won’t pursue them, but here we are again with a refiling, that massive damages number, and still no protectable shared material, just sentiment, which, in Swift’s catalog is omnipresent. To spend a minute being kind to the plaintiff, that’s often how these things happen. You hear your own emotional blueprint reflected back at you in someone else’s music and it feels personal. It maybe feels aimed at you. We connect those dots. It’s a pattern of appropriation across a bunch of works. I’ve encountered this so many times — “Yes, my client would like you to analyze five songs of theirs, all of which were stolen.” A good musicologist has to defuse that gently. And hopefully leave less angst behind. It’s normal, it’s human, but it’s almost invariably misplaced.
This case did not unravel because Swift is powerful or because the legal system bends for celebrities. It imploded because copyright law asks a simple question: what protectable expression did the defendant misappropriate? In this matter, the answer is nothing. And it was nothing long before anybody tried to hand papers to a security guard.
