Photo Credit: Kelly Sikkema
A federal judge has dismissed with prejudice a copyright infringement lawsuit that accused Taylor Swift of lifting creative elements from multiple poems across several albums.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon made that dismissal official today, after the plaintiff, a Florida-based writer named Kimberly Marasco, submitted a second amended complaint (a prior iteration, meaning a distinct 2024 suit, having also been tossed with prejudice) last year.
Originally filed against Swift, Aaron Dessner, and Universal Music, the 12-count amended action accused the artist of incorporating into her songs “protectable expressions substantially similar” to those found in Marasco’s poems.
Swift’s “Guilty as Sin?” allegedly borrowed from the plaintiff’s “Devious Minds,” for instance, with “My Tears Ricochet” having purportedly pulled from “Scorpion,” “Beams of Light,” “Gaslight,” and “Innocence Lost” alike.
Marasco released these and other allegedly infringed poems in books including Fallen from Grace (2019), later renamed Songs of the Unsung. And to state the obvious, the alleged usages weren’t authorized.
(The 47-page suit itself dedicated a good amount of ink to laying out the alleged poem-song overlap as well.)
“Here, the ‘striking’ similarities between Plaintiff’s Works and Defendants’ lyrics are so specific, unique, and improbable that independent creation is unlikely, supporting the inference of access. Courts have held that in cases of striking similarity, direct proof of access is not required at all,” the second amended complaint maintained in terms of how Team Swift may have accessed the allegedly infringed poems.
Unsurprisingly, Swift and her counsel fired back against the pro se suit – including in a December 2025 dismissal motion criticizing the action as “frivolous and harassing,” “meritless,” “groundless,” and “an impermissible shotgun pleading.”
As for the arguments behind the firmly worded descriptors, Team Swift called out the alleged infringement as involving unprotectable elements (“basic ideas, themes, metaphors, words, and short phrases” among them) and emphasized an alleged lack of actual access to Marasco’s poems in any event.
Now, Judge Cannon has agreed with the assessment, reiterating in her dismissal order that the “quintessential themes, concepts, and isolated words” at issue are “exactly the kind of material copyright law does not protect.”
Meanwhile, Marasco didn’t demonstrate that Swift had access to the relevant poems or illustrate substantial similarities in the artist’s songs, according to the judge.
“Plaintiff’s claims fail at the extrinsic step for the very reasons discussed above: once the unprotectable elements are filtered out, nothing remains to compare,” per the legal text.
And in closing, the court reiterated the points when stressing that “further amendment would be futile.”
“The defects identified are not pleading defects curable by more careful drafting—they are defects in the underlying works themselves, which consist of ideas, themes, metaphors, and isolated words that no amendment can transform into protectable expression,” Judge Cannon concluded.
With that, the case is no more; though Marasco doesn’t seem to have addressed the dismissal, it was only in late May that she doubled down on her position by releasing a book about the legal battle. Separately, Swift is still grappling with different IP-focused actions – one alleging Life of a Showgirl trademark infringement.
