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NY SONGWRITER: RASCAL FLATTS STOLE MY TUNE

A veteran New York songwriter, who penned Pat Benatar’s “Shadows of the Night,” is accusing the country group Rascal Flatts of stealing his iconic 1980s song.

The group, which is playing at Madison Square Garden Thursday with guest Jessica Simpson, is being attacked for “No Reins,” a song off its platinum “Still Feels Good” album.

Big Apple song man D.L. Byron filed a federal lawsuit against Rascal Flatts, their producers and Disney Music Group label.

Byron is specifically miffed about the first 17 seconds of “No Reins,” which sound familiar to the chorus from “Shadows of the Night.”

“It’s just too much, too strikingly similar,” Byron told The Post.

“They’d have to have a tremendous lapse of memory not to realize what they were doing. It’s my contention there’s willful infringement.”

The Rascal Flatts concert is the group’s first visit to Gotham since Byron filed his lawsuit last August in Manhattan federal court.

A rep for the group did not immediately respond to calls for comment. But a member of country boy band defended himself in court papers, saying that any parallels betwe en “No Reins” and “Shadows” is purely an accident.

“To the extent that ‘No Reins’ shares any similarities with the plaintiff’s alleged copyrighted work, any such similarities between the two works are the result of coincidence and/or the use of common or trite ideas,” according to lawyers for band member Joe Don Rooney.

Arguing that similarities were unintended might not completely get Rascal Flatts off the hook, according to an NYU Law School professor.

“They [“No Reins” and “Shadows”] certainly sound alike,” said Rochelle Dreyfuss, who teaches intellectual property and cited George Harrison’s famous case with “My Sweet Lord” and the Chiffons.

“George Harrison lost, even though the court assumed the copying was unintentional — that Harrison had heard ‘He’s So Fine’ but forgotten it.