IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT NEWS: Pop superstar makes swift work of copyright infringement claim, (Jul 8, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

A poet fails in her second attempt against Taylor Swift.

A Florida poet will not get a chance to proceed in her copyright infringement lawsuit against Taylor Swift because she claimed infringement only of unprotectable “ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes,” the District Court for the Southern District of Florida has held. The court, in dismissing the claims against the pop superstar, also found that the poet failed to show any substantial similarity between her works and the Swift songs at issue.

The lawsuit is the second attempt by author Kimberly Marasco to assert infringement claims over Swift. In her first lawsuit, originally filed pro sein 2024 in small claims court but later removed to federal court, the author contended that Swift purloined passages and themes from two of her books of poetry. The court dismissed the complaint without prejudice in September 2025 for failure to state a claim, finding that the allegedly purloined passages “amount[ed] at most to ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes” and in any event were not substantially similar to the Swift songs at issue.

By the time, however, the author had filed another lawsuit against Swift—this time adding collaborators Aaron Dessner and Jack Antonoff, as well as record labels Universal Music Group and Republic Records, as defendants. After the poet dropped the case against Antonoff and failed to serve Dessner, the remaining defendants moved to dismiss, leading to this opinion.

Copyright protection. The court dismissed the claim. Because the dismissal of the earlier case was not intended to be a final determination of the merits of the claims, the court noted, it would not have preclusive effect. But the outcome was no different this time around. The new lawsuit largely reprised the old one, the court emphasized, “through the same categories of asserted similarity: basic ideas and themes (a woman working in a corporate environment, being ‘gaslighted,’ confronting adversity); ubiquitous metaphors (being ‘submerged’ under water, ‘tears as weapons,’ ‘desire as fuel and fire,’ becoming ‘the rain/storm’); and isolated common words and short phrases (‘tears,’ ‘running,’ ‘fire,’ ‘rain,’ ‘sky,’ ‘love,’ ‘invisible,’ ‘caged me,’ ‘flesh and blood,’ ‘it’s time to go’). This content, as in the prior case, the court found, amounted also to “ideas, metaphors, contexts, and themes—none of which is a proper subject of copyright protection.”

Substantial similarity. And even if the passages at issue had been protectable under copyright law, the court found, the claim would still fail. Because “there could be a case to be made that Plaintiff’s allegations, while relatively bare, suggest at least some degree of access to her works on the internet,” the court noted, it would focus on “the substantial-similarity prong of the copying element.” In the earlier case, the court noted, it had found that there was no substantial similarity between the works because the asserted commonalities consisted only of unprotectable ideas, themes, and “isolated words.” For the new allegations in the current lawsuit, the court observed, “the works are not even substantially similar—a point Plaintiff effectively concedes by characterizing the alleged copying as ‘paraphrase[s],’ ‘rephrase[s],’ and copying with ‘minor word substitutions.’” Admitted differences of that kind, the court concluded, “cannot satisfy the substantial-similarity standard.”

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