{"id":675108,"date":"2026-11-04T22:24:10","date_gmt":"2026-11-04T22:24:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/675108\/"},"modified":"2026-11-04T22:24:10","modified_gmt":"2026-11-04T22:24:10","slug":"bts-swim-copyright-lawsuit-dropped-by-accusers","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/675108\/","title":{"rendered":"BTS \u2018Swim\u2019 Copyright Lawsuit Dropped by Accusers"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tA lawsuit claiming that BTS<\/a>\u2019 chart-topping smash \u201cSwim\u201d ripped off an earlier song has now been dropped by the accusers.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe case, filed in July<\/a> against BTS label HYBE, alleged that the hit song \u2014 which debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100 this spring as the lead track off ARIRANG \u2014 had many \u201csubstantial similarities\u201d to an unpublished demo of the same name by three little-known songwriters.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tRelated\t\t<\/p>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t\t\"Niall<\/p>\n

\t\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\tBut less than four months later, attorneys for those three accusers (Steve Cooper, Jon Sandler and Greylyn Johnson) asked the judge in a Wednesday (Nov. 4) court filing to dismiss the lawsuit in its entirety.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt was unclear from court documents if any kind of settlement had been reached, and neither side immediately returned requests for comment. The case remained in its earliest stages, with HYBE\u2019s attorneys not yet having even formally responded to it.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn their July complaint, the three accusers claimed they had sent out copies of their demo in March 2025 \u201cto various parties for them to consider.\u201d That allegedly included execs at Artist Publishing Group, who the plaintiffs claimed \u201clistened to the [demo] and shared it with others,\u201d including some of the songwriters who eventually worked on \u201cSwim.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAfter Cooper, Sandler and Johnson noticed the alleged similarities, they said they hired a forensic musicologist to compare the two songs and that the musicologist concluded that the BTS version contained numerous elements that were \u201cunequivocally taken\u201d from the demo.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cUpon listening several times [to \u201cSwim\u201d], plaintiffs came to what they considered to be the obvious and inescapable conclusion that [it] copied in very large part the original work and clearly infringed their copyrights,\u201d lawyers for the trio wrote at the time.<\/p>\n

\n\tThe lawsuit didn\u2019t name BTS or its members as defendants; instead, it targeted their label, HYBE, and its subsidiaries, HYBE America and Big Hit Music Co. It also named the songwriters behind the BTS track, including former OneRepublic<\/a> member Ryan Tedder<\/a>, a Grammy-winning hitmaker who has also written songs for Taylor Swift<\/a>, Beyonc\u00e9<\/a> and Adele<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n\tA quick withdrawal is nothing unusual for big copyright lawsuits over chart-topping hits. Just last week, a headline-grabbing case<\/a> filed against Drake<\/a> over his No. 1 single \u201cJanice STFU\u201d was abruptly dropped<\/a> by the accuser less than two weeks after it was first filed.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A lawsuit claiming that BTS\u2019 chart-topping smash \u201cSwim\u201d ripped off an earlier song has now been dropped by…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":675109,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28],"tags":[93,61,60,6522,3535,2900,278,633],"class_list":["post-675108","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-music","tag-entertainment","tag-ie","tag-ireland","tag-kpop","tag-lawsuit","tag-legal","tag-music","tag-music-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675108","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=675108"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/675108\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/675109"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=675108"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=675108"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=675108"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}