Federal Judge Tosses Poet's Second Copyright Suit Against Taylor Swift

A federal judge in Florida has dismissed a $25 million copyright lawsuit filed against Taylor Swift by an amateur poet, marking the second time the same plaintiff has had nearly identical claims thrown out of court.

U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon ruled Monday that Kimberly Marasco, who filed the complaint without a lawyer, could not show that the material she says Swift lifted amounted to anything protected under copyright law.

The songs in question, according to Marasco, borrowed language and imagery from two of her self-published poetry books, but Cannon found the supposed overlap boiled down to widely used ideas and stock imagery, the kind no author can claim to own. She pointed specifically to concepts like being manipulated or gaslighted, and common imagery such as feeling submerged or drowning, as examples of material too generic for anyone to monopolize.

This was not Marasco's first attempt. Cannon dismissed an earlier version of the lawsuit last year, which named Swift along with Taylor Swift Productions Inc., though Swift herself was dropped from that case after Marasco failed to have her formally served with the complaint.

In both rulings, Cannon reached the same basic conclusion: Marasco never identified specific creative expression that copyright law actually covers, and she never laid out a plausible case that Swift had copied her work in the first place.

The revived lawsuit, filed in February 2025, expanded the list of defendants to include Swift's label, Republic Records, and its parent company, Universal Music Group. It repeated several allegations from the earlier case while adding new claims tied to Marasco's poetry collections, one of which had sold only around 300 copies worldwide; for the second book, Marasco offered no sales figures at all.

Among the songs named in the complaint were "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart" and "Mastermind," along with several others Marasco said echoed her writing. In one specific comparison highlighted in the suit, Marasco pointed to lyrics from Swift's song "The Man," which describe the frustration of wondering whether life would be easier as a man, and argued they mirrored lines from her own poem about a woman navigating a male-dominated workplace.

Marasco had also tried earlier in the case to get an injunction blocking Swift from performing, selling or otherwise distributing the disputed songs, including in her recent documentary series, but Cannon rejected that request back in December.

While the defendants had urged the judge to throw out the whole case on the theory that Marasco was already barred from relitigating the same issues, Cannon declined to go that route, noting that her earlier dismissal had not been meant to permanently resolve every claim Marasco might bring. Even so, she dismissed the portions of the new complaint that overlapped with the original suit for the same underlying reason as before: the alleged similarities were limited to themes, metaphors, and ideas, none of which qualifies as protectable expression under the Copyright Act. Turning to the newer claims tied to Marasco's books, Cannon reached an identical conclusion, writing bluntly that none of the plaintiff's twelve counts identifies any protected expression.

The judge also faulted Marasco's case on a separate front. To win a copying claim, a plaintiff generally must show both that the defendant had access to the original work and that actual copying occurred.

Cannon found Marasco's assertions that her poetry was simply posted online amounted to little more than a vague, unsupported claim of access. That left the analysis resting entirely on whether the works were substantially similar, and once the unprotectable ideas and generic phrasing were stripped away, the judge found there was nothing left to compare.