Taylor Swift has scored another legal victory.
Billboard reports that Teresa La Dart, who’d alleged Taylor stole parts of her self-published poetry book for the book that accompanied 2019’s Lover, has dropped her lawsuit.
La Dart had claimed that Taylor’s Lover book, featuring diary entries and photos, had copied “a number of creative elements” from her poetry book, which came out in 2010 and was also called Lover.
Among the elements La Dart had claimed Taylor stole were the use of pastel pinks and blues, a photograph showing Taylor in a specific pose and the book’s format in general, which La Dart’s suit described as “a recollection of past years memorialized in a combination of written and pictorial components” and “interspersed photographs and writings.”
Taylor’s lawyers argued that those elements can be found in so many other books that they are generic and therefore not subject to copyright protection. They called La Dart’s case “legally and factually baseless,” saying it “never should have been filed,” according to Billboard.
Billboard notes that La Dart may have dropped the suit in order to cut her losses: If she’d gone forward with it, she might have lost, and then, the judge might have ordered her to pay what easily could have amounted to thousands of dollars’ worth of Taylor’s legal bills.
Copyright © 2023, ABC Audio. All rights reserved.
