“I hope my students will exchange friendship bracelets”: This professor is bringing a Taylor Swift course to Queen’s law school

Taylor Swift is famous for her lovelorn pop songs—like those on her brand new record-smashing album, The Tortured Poets Department—but the global superstar has left her mark on more than just the charts. A new course at Queen’s University this fall will look at Swift’s interactions with the legal system throughout her career and how she’s affected entertainment law in the music industry.

Mohamed Khimji is the David Allgood Professor in Business Law at Queen’s and the avowed Swift fan behind the course. He believes that even non-Swifties should pay attention to her influence. “We’ve never seen anything like her before,” Khimji says. Here, he talks about how his class—the first of its kind in Canada—will use Swift’s career as a lens for the big-picture issues shaping the contemporary music landscape, like artists’ rights, originality and privacy. Haters, take note.

First things first: Would you call yourself a Swiftie? Absolutely.

When did you become a fan? I arrived a little bit late to the party. I really didn’t know anything about her until the pandemic. Then I read a review of Folklore, and I was intrigued that she was collaborating with Justin Vernon on a song called “Exile.” I listened to it and loved it instantly.

How did you go from Swift stan to shaping a curriculum around her career? About a month ago I was talking to one of my colleagues, who’s also a fan of Taylor. We were going through her re-recorded albums and debating whether the original or Taylor’s Version was better. My colleague asked me: Why did Taylor Swift re-record her albums? I started explaining the legal and the business reasons, and it made me think my students would be interested in this as well. In that instant, the course name came to me: “Law (Taylor’s Version).”

People are familiar with the cultural impact that Swift has, the social impact that she has, the political impact that she has. I mean, Thailand and Singapore are fighting about which country gets the exclusive right to host the Eras Tour in that part of the world. She inspires famous levels of devotion in her fans. We’re really a community—whenever I wear my Eras shirt out in public, I get smiles and comments from other fans. But she’s had a legal impact on the music industry as well, specifically with regard to how record deals are negotiated.

Related: Meet the Toronto designer who sourced Taylor Swift’s vintage Chiefs sweatshirt

Why did Swift re-record her first six albums? This is such a great story. In 2019, it was actually Kelly Clarkson who suggested in a tweet that Swift re-record her music. To understand why, you need to understand the copyright regime. In a simple sense, musicians have exclusive rights when it comes to the reproduction of their original work. However, you can vary default rules by way of contractual agreement.

Typically in a record deal, what happens is the record company gets permission to reproduce the work—i.e., to produce an album for distribution—and usually in these agreements ownership of the recording—technically known as the master—is transferred to the record company. So, because of the deal she had originally signed with Big Machine Records, Big Machine owned the masters for her first six albums, and Swift didn’t.

Practically, this is relevant because not owning the masters means that artists don’t necessarily have final say over where their recordings can be played and licensed. For example, let’s say a song is to be used in a commercial. If Taylor’s Version is used, her authorization is needed. However, if the original version is used, authorization is needed from whoever owns the masters. The question of who owns the masters, then, has massive effects for artists in terms of their control over their image, their art and their royalties. Because of Taylor Swift, artists like Olivia Rodrigo are prioritizing owning their masters.

In this case, there was an extra wrinkle where Big Machine was purchased by Scooter Braun, former manager of Kanye West, with whom Swift has a fraught history, to say the least. “Essentially, my musical legacy is about to lie in the hands of someone who tried to dismantle it,” Swift wrote on Tumblr at the time. That’s the thing about property—it’s transferrable.

Your course will also look at many other interactions Swift has had with the legal system, like when Sean Hall and Nathan Butler filed a lawsuit accusing her of copying lyrics from the 3LW song “Playas Gon’ Play” for her 2014 hit “Shake It Off.” The lawsuit was eventually dismissed. What does that case tell us about copyright law? Copyright gives musicians—and any other authors—exclusivity rights over their original work. The key word there being original. My own view here is that the law just has to do a better job defining the standard for originality. There’s a lack of clarity, and that lack of clarity is really damaging to the music industry. When laws lack clarity, people have an incentive to file lawsuits with the idea that a settlement is going to be cheaper than going to court, even when there’s no basis for the claim whatsoever. And that’s a problem with the content of the law.

There’s been a spate of high-profile copyright cases in the last ten years or so, like lawsuits claiming similarity between Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” and Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” or the recent lawsuit against Justin Bieber and Dan and Shay claiming their song “10,000 Hours” plagiarizes R&B song “The First Time Baby Is a Holiday.” There are too many to list. It’s a problem with our legal system—it’s too expensive to go to court, which incentivizes the threat of a lawsuit, because it makes settling more likely. This isn’t just limited to the music industry.

Swift is also no stranger to invoking legal action, particularly in her use of cease and desists. Swift is good at many things. One of them is crafting her own image and maintaining it. The cease and desist is an important part of doing that successfully. A cease and desist is really a power move—it’s designed to manage how she is perceived. In 2017, for example, a blog called PopFront published an article called “Swiftly to the alt-right: Taylor subtly gets the lower case kkk in formation,” suggesting that Swift’s music contained dog whistles for white supremacists. Swift’s lawyer quickly sent a cease and desist letter to the author, alleging among other things that the article was a “malicious attack.” That case illustrates the tension between freedom of expression and privacy as well as the tension between those two things and entertaining the public with individual lives. This course will require students to wrestle with all those tensions.

There are rumours that Swift has been giving her boyfriend, football player Travis Kelce, advice on filing trademarks for his name and his phrases. What do those trademarks do for Kelce? Filing a trademark is ultimately about protecting your name and reputation. Travis now has a very strong brand. It makes sense that strategically he’s being proactive and laying the groundwork for his future business ventures. There is a threshold for acquiring a trademark, which is distinctiveness. It remains to be seen whether all of the things that are being claimed will meet that threshold.

How do you meet that threshold? You’ll have to take the course to find out! There’s a legal standard. The best way to think about the content of the law is that law will have rules which are very clear and easy to understand. But law will also have standards, like distinctiveness, like originality. Standards tend to be less clear, which is why they cause litigation and argument.

Swift sparked a couple of lawsuits in 2022, when fans experienced extreme technical difficulties and spiking prices trying to get tickets to the Eras Tour (Toronto fans in 2023 weren’t much luckier). Fans sued Ticketmaster, calling it a “predatory monopoly,” and the Department of Justice launched an investigation into the company. Now, it looks like the DOJ could sue Ticketmaster’s parent company for breaking antitrust laws. Is the Eras Tour changing the structure of live music as we know it? There are two problems with Ticketmaster’s monopoly. One is that they’re providing a bad service. They’re a single supplier—with an artist like Taylor Swift, of course you’re going to have a bottleneck effect and the system will crash. The other problem is that artists who end up dealing with Ticketmaster can’t negotiate with them. The first problem affects fans, and the second problem affects people in the industry, and now these two groups are coming together with the same goal.

This is a competition law issue at the federal level, but there have also been many initiatives at state level intended to increase transparency and fairness in online ticket sales. The names of some of these bills illustrate Taylor Swift’s impact. For example, in Washington, the lawmakers called their proposal the “Ticket Sales Warrant Integrity, Fairness, and Transparency (TSWIFT) for Consumer Protection Act.”

Related: Why one lawyer is leading a class-action lawsuit against Ticketmaster

Your course starts in September. Will it be as hard to get a spot as it was an Eras Tour ticket? I don’t want to make people as upset as the fans who deal with Ticketmaster! People are really excited about this. I’m getting emails from alumni, former students from other schools asking if they can take it. So I’ll have my research seminar, which I’d like to be thirty people, but I’m also thinking about whether there’s a way to develop an online version of the course.

Thoughts on the new album? I’m having a similar experience to it as with Midnights, where every month I had a favourite song. At first, “Tortured Poets Department” was my favourite, but “Fortnight” is now the second one I’m obsessing over. I love the end, when Post Malone is singing softly.

Will you be playing any of her songs in class? Of course. I’ve got to play “Shake It Off” and “Playas Gon’ Play” side by side as we consider the plagiarism accusations against Swift. I also hope that the students will be exchanging friendship bracelets.

Even for those who aren’t racing to join a Taylor Swift singalong, why is it important to take her seriously? If we were to search for a historical comparison to her we would struggle to find one. Even if you don’t like her music, even if you find her fame annoying, she is clearly a phenomenon worthy of study. I’m thrilled that it’s not only my course at Queen’s—there’s a literature course at Harvard, there’s a course at Stanford focusing only on “All Too Well.” One song! I think it’s great—contemporary issues matter as much as historical issues. And she is clearly one of the most relevant contemporary phenomena of our time.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.