Okay Taylor, now you’re putting tickets on yourself…

It’s one thing for a music artist to copyright their songs. Protecting their art as a ‘whole’ makes a lot of sense – that is copyrighting the music, the lyrics, the melody, the whole shebang. But for a musician to take a couple of common words from her lyric sheets and virtually state “hands off, bitches, these mots are mine”, well, that’s taking things too far.

Taylor Swift recently took legal precautions a step beyond the normal this week by filing trademarks on several of her lyrics – nay, tiny batches of words – from her popular-selling album 1989.

The Blank Space singer filled in handfuls of forms stipulating that commercially-inclined folks cannot and will not adopt such phrases as ‘this sick beat’ and ‘nice to meet you, where you been?’ without the artist’s consent (and most likely a hefty price tag).

Aside from obvious products prohibited from featuring her lyrics, including t-shirts, mugs and stationery, the patent protection extends to somewhat more obscure objects such as knitting implements and napkin holders. And hell hath fury on the struggling artist at your local markets who might just want to tag that illustration of you and your partner with the line “’cause we never go out of style”. He’ll be slapped with a lawsuit quicker than you can say, “Was she really the first to say that?”.

It’s not clear who encouraged Taylor to take such swift (and perhaps presumptuous and overly paranoid) precautions but she does have two very savvy parents.

Then again, considering she appeared on the cover of last November’s issue of TIME magazine, branded with the cover line ‘The Power Of Taylor Swift’, perhaps things are going to the girl’s head a little too quickly already…  Antonino Tati