A lawsuit claiming that BTS’ chart-topping smash “Swim” ripped off an earlier song has now been dropped by the accusers.
The case, filed in July against BTS label HYBE, alleged that the hit song — which debuted at No. 1 on the Hot 100 this spring as the lead track off ARIRANG — had many “substantial similarities” to an unpublished demo of the same name by three little-known songwriters.
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But 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.
It 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’s attorneys not yet having even formally responded to it.
In their July complaint, the three accusers claimed they had sent out copies of their demo in March 2025 “to various parties for them to consider.” That allegedly included execs at Artist Publishing Group, who the plaintiffs claimed “listened to the [demo] and shared it with others,” including some of the songwriters who eventually worked on “Swim.”
After 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 “unequivocally taken” from the demo.
“Upon listening several times [to “Swim”], 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,” lawyers for the trio wrote at the time.
The lawsuit didn’t 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 member Ryan Tedder, a Grammy-winning hitmaker who has also written songs for Taylor Swift, Beyoncé and Adele.
A quick withdrawal is nothing unusual for big copyright lawsuits over chart-topping hits. Just last week, a headline-grabbing case filed against Drake over his No. 1 single “Janice STFU” was abruptly dropped by the accuser less than two weeks after it was first filed.
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