Background
This is the second federal copyright lawsuit brought by Kimberly Marasco, a Florida poet who claimed that Taylor Swift copied phrases and themes from her published poems. In February 2025, Marasco filed a new complaint (her first suit, filed in May 2024 under case No. 24-cv-14153, had been dismissed for failure to timely serve the defendants). Marasco alleged that Swift, along with co-writers Jack Antonoff and Aaron Dessner and record label defendants Republic Records and Universal Music Group, incorporated her poetic expression into two tracks from Swift’s 2024 album The Tortured Poets Department: “Down Bad” and “I Can Do It with a Broken Heart.”
Marasco represented herself throughout the litigation. After the court permitted her to amend her pleading, she filed a Second Amended Complaint that served as the operative filing. The defendants moved to dismiss, arguing that the poems contained no protectable expression and that Marasco had failed to plausibly allege that Swift had access to the poems or that the works were substantially similar.
The Court’s Holding
Judge Cannon granted the motion to dismiss with prejudice on July 6, 2026, identifying two independent grounds for dismissal.
First, the court concluded that Marasco’s poems do not contain protectable expression. Copyright does not protect ideas, themes, concepts, metaphors, or isolated words and short phrases — it protects only the specific creative expression in which those elements are rendered. Judge Cannon found that the alleged similarities between the poems and Swift’s songs amounted to nothing more than “unprotectable ideas, themes, metaphors, and isolated words,” including generic poetic conceits such as confronting adversity and water imagery. These building blocks of poetic expression belong to the public domain and cannot be monopolized by any single author.
Second, even setting aside the copyrightability question, the court found that Marasco failed to plausibly plead copying. The Complaint offered no plausible basis to infer that Swift or her co-writers had access to Marasco’s poems before writing the songs. Where the Second Amended Complaint added new specific comparisons, the court observed that “the works are not even substantially similar” — Marasco herself characterized the alleged copying as “paraphrasing with minor word substitutions,” which is insufficient as a matter of law to establish the substantial similarity required for copyright infringement.
Because no further amendment could cure these fundamental defects, the dismissal was entered with prejudice, foreclosing any future refiling of the claims.
Key Takeaways
- Ideas and themes are not copyrightable. Generic poetic subjects — overcoming hardship, elemental imagery, heartbreak — are part of the public domain. Only the unique expressive treatment of those themes may be protected.
- Isolated words and short phrases get no copyright protection. Courts have long held that fragments of expression, even if creatively chosen, fall below the minimum originality threshold for copyright.
- Substantial similarity requires more than paraphrase. Replacing a few words while keeping the same general idea is not copying of protectable expression — it is transformation that copyright law permits.
- A second dismissal with prejudice closes the courthouse door. Marasco’s repeated attempts to refile underscore that courts will not allow serial re-litigation of claims that were deficient at the threshold.
Why It Matters
This case illustrates the high bar plaintiffs must clear when alleging that popular song lyrics infringe poetry. The music industry faces a steady stream of copyright claims based on lyrical or thematic overlap, and courts have consistently reinforced that copyright does not protect the vocabulary of human emotion. Judge Cannon’s decision reaffirms that commonplace metaphors, shared themes, and short phrases remain freely available for any artist to use — a critical safeguard against the over-propertization of creative expression.
The dismissal with prejudice also signals that courts have little patience for repeat litigation of claims that were deficient from the outset. Self-represented plaintiffs who file successive lawsuits based on the same flawed theory will not receive unlimited opportunities to amend.
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