Taylor Swift’s Lover’s Book Lawsuit Update

On July 26, Teresa La Dart voluntarily dropped the lawsuit against Taylor Swift and Taylor Swift Productions, Inc. La Dart filed a complaint in a Tennessee federal court to Taylor Swift and TSP in August 2022 for Swift’s 2019 Lover book copying “a number of creative elements” from her own poem book titled the same name “Lover”. Within the complaint document, Teresa’s lawyer claimed that “excess of one million dollars” in damages must be owed by Swift.

The similarities that La Dart pointed out were the title name, the use of “pastel pinks and blues,” and the “photographed in a downward pose” of author. The Mississippi author also claimed that the format of Taylor’s book resembles the author’s book in that they both have “a recollection of past years memorialized in a combination of written and pictorial components” that contain  “interspersed photographs and writings.”

Image Credit: Republic Records

“This is a lawsuit that never should have been filed,” Taylor’s lawyer Doug Baldridge said in February. Baldridge mentions that the elements that La Dart claimed as copyright were not distinguishable enough to order copyright protection as they were simply just common features that almost any book can have. And for her to file this complaint, La Dart might as well be suing every other artist. “Thus, defendants could not possibly have infringed plaintiff’s copyright.”

A dismissal was requested by Baldridge from a filing from March as he described her accusations as “entirely meritless” and “woefully deficient.” Since the lawsuit was filed in August 2022, Swift has never commented on it.

Published by HOLR Magazine.