Taylor Swift wins copyright case dismissal as "Eras Tour" film gets five Emmy nods

Taylor Swift had two reasons to celebrate the same week: her concert film, "The Eras Tour: The Final Show," picked up five Emmy nominations, and a federal judge in Florida threw out a copyright lawsuit that had accused her of plagiarizing a self-published poet, the Los Angeles Times reported.

The film's nominations cover variety special (pre-recorded), sound mixing, directing, picture editing and technical direction and camerawork for a variety special. Because the nod for variety special names Swift herself as a performer and producer, it counts as her second career Emmy nomination, after she won in 2015 for executive-producing the mobile app "AMEX Unstaged: Taylor Swift Experience."

The nominations arrived five days after Swift married Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden in Manhattan. The two have told the story of how they first connected at a 2023 tour stop, when Kelce tried and failed to hand Swift his phone number on a friendship bracelet.

The copyright case dismissed this week was Florida poet Kimberly Marasco's second attempt against Swift; the same judge threw out a similar suit last September. Marasco, representing herself, argued Swift lifted "unique expressions" from her poetry for songs including "The Man," "Down Bad," "I Can Do It With a Broken Heart," "Hoax," "Guilty as Sin?" and "It's Time to Go." U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon rejected the claim, writing that the disputed material, words such as "tears," "fire," "rain" and "invisible," amounted to "basic ideas, themes, metaphors, isolated words, and short phrases" that is "not protected expression and cannot be infringed." Swift's lawyers had called the suit "absurd and legally baseless" in their motion to dismiss.

Cannon went further, writing that even if the material were protected, the two bodies of work are "not even substantially similar," a point she said Marasco effectively conceded by describing her own claims as paraphrases and "minor word substitutions." Marasco has already filed an appeal, so the case is not fully closed even as Swift's pop career keeps racking up honors; she was previously inducted into the Nashville Songwriters Hall of Fame and is up against Madonna for 2026 MTV VMA nominations.