copyright infringement
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The estate of Donna Summer filed a copyright lawsuit against Kanye West on Tuesday (Feb. 27), accusing him of “shamelessly” using her 1977 hit “I Feel Love” without permission in his song “Good (Don’t Die).” Explore See latest videos, charts and news See latest videos, charts and news In a complaint filed in Los Angeles […]
During its first week of release, Vultures 1, the first full-length release from the artist formerly known as Kanye West and singer Ty Dolla $ign, changed distributors, was pulled from Apple Music temporarily and got cut by a song to ward off a possible copyright infringement issue brought up by Donna Summer’s estate. So far, the story of the album may be as interesting as the music itself — and Billboard has reported that some samples remain uncleared, which suggests that this could only be the beginning.
Like many hip-hop artists, Ye makes music that involves both snippets of other recordings (samples) and passages of other songs that are re-recorded (interpolations, which confusingly are often referred to as samples as well). Samples generally require a license from the owner of the recording and the underlying composition, while interpolations only require the latter. West seems to have cleared some of the samples and interpolations he’s used, but not all of them.
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There was a time when that would have been dangerous. When the music business was dominated by physical media, rights holders whose work was used without a license had the legal leverage they needed to take most, or even all, of the rights to a song, as ABKCO famously did with the Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony,” which sampled a version of the ABKCO-controlled Rolling Stones song “The Last Time.” The Verve’s only other choice would have been to destroy all existing copies of the album it was on and stop promoting what became its breakthrough hit.
West won’t face those issues, partly because no single song on Vultures 1 depends as much on one sample or interpolation, and partly because the nature of streaming means that most music — most art, really — isn’t ever really final anymore. When the estate of Donna Summer said that West had used elements of “I Feel Love” without a license for “Good (Don’t Die),” the song was simply pulled offline. Uncleared samples could be re-recorded, if West can get permission from a publisher but not a label, or simply replaced by other musical elements. Albums can evolve for legal reasons as well as artistic ones.
This is an extreme example of what seems like a general trend, as is the Travis Scott album Utopia which Billboard recently reported has its own issues with songwriting credits and royalty splits. In this case, Scott worked with producers and co-writers but didn’t finalize all of the relevant agreements. Scott is far from the only artist to deal with this issue. Here, too, Scott’s collaborators could sue — although this would be a foolish move since many of them depend on his star power to market their work and the nature of streaming blunts potential legal threats.
In both cases, the balance of power in a licensing system that initially gave more leverage to songwriters and other rights holders is now tilting toward recording artists, especially powerful ones. That could be bad for other creators, because the less money they make, the more tempted they are to take any deal they can get to keep money coming in. In most cases, delays in negotiation and payment are just that — arranging all the co-writing deals gets very complicated because there’s only so much credit, and thus royalties, to go around. But the way the leverage shifts toward artists doesn’t exactly inspire their teams to deal with this as fast as possible.
The same kind of pressure doesn’t apply to publishers that control interpolation rights for older songs, but it’s important to remember that this money, too, goes to creators — often on better terms than streaming revenue does. Financial issues aside, creators also have the right to decide if they want to be associated with other creators, just as they have the right to turn down advertisement opportunities. In West’s case, Ozzy Osbourne turned down West’s request to sample a live version of “Iron Man,” which he wrote with his bandmates in Black Sabbath, because of West’s antisemitic comments. So West simply went ahead and sampled his own song, “Hell of a Life,” which uses the same riff. Osbourne should be able to prevent that — his team didn’t comment on West’s use of this other song — and he may decide to try.
The music business needs a code of conduct to deal with this situation before it gets any worse. If it’s overly strict to require artists to sort out all rights before the release of an album, a voluntary code could mandate having rough agreements in place or requiring final ones to be completed within a certain amount of time. The idea would be to give artists the time they need to sort out rights issues, within reasonable deadlines that will keep negotiations relatively equitable. If artists can’t figure out the credits issues that get their collaborators paid, maybe they shouldn’t submit their music for the Grammy Awards — which are voted on by other creators — or even be allowed to. The idea isn’t to penalize anyone, just to create a hard deadline.
None of this would address Osbourne’s issue with West, which I can’t help but take more seriously than the others. Think about it: The No. 1 album in the country this week is by an antisemite who has praised Adolph Hitler and the Nazis and will soon headline a major festival. (In December, West apologized for his comments with a statement in Hebrew but it’s hard to know how seriously to take that, considering that this album has a line about how “I just f—ed a Jewish b—-.”) I think it’s possible to enjoy good art made by bad people, and I assume that most people listening to Vultures 1 don’t agree with the crazy things West has said. At the same time, it feels wrong to write about the copyright issues West faces without acknowledging how hateful he has been. Presumably, West will find ways to license the snippets of music he uses on this album or else replace them. But as he faces pushback from creators and rights holders who are reluctant to be associated with him, as Osbourne is, perhaps he’ll begin a more serious effort to make up for some of the awful things he’s said.
A federal appeals court has overturned a massive $1 billion copyright verdict won by the major record labels against internet service provider Cox Communications, sending the case back for a new award to be calculated.
In a decision Tuesday (Feb . 20), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit vacated the huge award against Cox over illegal downloading by its subscribers — one of the largest ever in an intellectual property lawsuit — on the grounds that part of the verdict was not supported by the law.
The ruling sets the stage for a new trial, but Cox could still be on the hook for heavy damages. That’s because, while the appeals court overturned the jury’s decision that Cox committed so-called vicarious copyright infringement, it affirmed that the internet service provider (ISP) had still committed a different type of infringement.
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Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group all sued Cox in 2018, seeking to hold the internet giant itself liable for alleged wrongdoing committed by its users. The labels said Cox had ignored hundreds of thousands of infringement notices and had never permanently terminated a single subscriber accused of stealing music.
The case was part of a string of such lawsuits filed against ISPs around the country. Charter Communications, RCN Corp., Grande Communications and others were hit with the same claims around the same time.
ISPs like Cox are often shielded from lawsuits over illegal downloading by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA. But the judge overseeing the case said that Cox had forfeited that protection by failing to terminate people who repeatedly violated copyright law.
Stripped of that immunity, jurors held Cox liable in December 2019 for the infringement of 10,017 separate songs. They awarded the labels more than $99,000 for each song, adding up to $1 billion. Cox eventually appealed that verdict to the Fourth Circuit, a federal appeals court that could overturn it.
In Tuesday’s ruling, the appeals court said that the jury had been correct to find that Cox had willfully committed so-called contributory copyright infringement — meaning the company had induced or authorized its customers to pirate the music. But the court said that the labels had failed to show that Cox committed vicarious infringement, which would have required proving that the ISP profited from the illegal downloading.
“The continued payment of monthly fees for internet service, even by repeat infringers, was not a financial benefit flowing directly from the copyright infringement itself,” the appeals court wrote. “Sony has not identified any evidence that customers were attracted to Cox’s internet service or paid higher monthly fees because of the opportunity to infringe Plaintiffs’ copyrights.”
Because part of the verdict was tossed out, the court ruled that a new trial would be needed to recalculate the damages award — this time, based only on the finding of contributory infringement.
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Ice Spice will now have to defend her name in a court of law. One of her peers says she lifted a large part from his song for “In Ha Mood”.
Digital Music News is reporting that the Bronx, New York native is being sued by a Brooklyn MC for allegedly shark biting. On Wednesday, Jan. 17 D. Chamberz (born Duval Chamberlain) filed a lawsuit at Brooklyn Federal Court against Ice Spice. He claims that her 2023 hit “In Ha Mood” took elements from his 2021 single “In That Mood”. The submitted paperwork details his complaint saying “by every method of analysis, ‘In Ha Mood’ is a forgery. Any proper comparative analysis of the beat, lyrics, hook, rhythmic structure, metrical placement, and narrative context will demonstrate that ‘In Ha Mood’ was copied or principally derived from ‘In That Mood.’”
His legal team would also allege that the resemblances have been noticed by Hip-Hop fans prior to the filing. “Non-expert listeners have independently pointed out that Defendants ‘stole’ ‘In That Mood’ in creating ‘In Ha Mood,’” his lawyer wrote. “The two songs clearly employ numerous noticeably similar composition elements and lyrics, which result in a sound and feel that are very much alike.”
They also speculate that Ice Spice’s producer RIOTUSA was familiar with “In That Mood” saying that he posted an Instagram Story of him listening to New York radio station HOT97 minutes prior to the song being played. Additionally the lawsuit points to RIOTUSA’s father DJ ENUFF, a radio personality on HOT97, that “actively engaged with D. Chamberz’s social media content.”
Ice Spice has yet to publicly comment on the matter. You can listen to “In That Mood” below.
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The widow of late hip-hop legend MF DOOM, Jasmine Dumile Thompson, filed a lawsuit, claiming that his manager, Eothen “Egon” Alapatt, stole 31 of the rapper’s notebooks that were used to write down many of his beloved songs. This included the tracks from Operation Doomsday (1999), Madvillainy (2004), and MM…FOOD (2004) as well as unreleased songs ideas, musings and “other creative ideations.”
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The case, filed in California federal court Tuesday, is not the first time DOOM’s fans have heard about these notebooks. Back in March, Thompson posted emails between her late husband and Alapatt to the @MFDOOM instagram account with the caption “Egon, Give the Notebooks Back,” sending fans to rally around the rapper’s estate and its struggle to repossess his writing material. Alapatt, who first started working with DOOM as general manager and a&r of Stones Throw Records, has admitted to having the notebooks in the past, according to the complaint, but the estate says he refuses to return them.
Instead, Alapatt is allegedly demanding that the notebooks be “donated to a university or government archive” or a “museum or other institution of [Alapatt’s] choosing,” even though doing so is contrary to his estate’s wishes. “[The notebooks] were intended by DOOM to be secret and confidential,” the lawsuit reads.
It all started in 2010, when the metal-masked rapper travelled to the U.K. to perform but was prohibited from returning to the U.S. due to immigration issues. (He remained in the U.K. until his death on October 31, 2020 at the age of 49). During his absence, the 31 notebooks of lyrical material were left behind in his Los Angeles studio, according to the lawsuit, and Alapatt “took unlawful possession” of the books about six years later.
“Alapatt never consulted with DOOM about his acquisition of the notebooks and took advantage of DOOM’s being out the country to obtain them,” the lawsuit says, but when first confronted by DOOM about the whereabouts of his books, Alapatt allegedly lied at first, saying he didn’t have them. After the landlord of DOOM’s studio allegedly told DOOM that Alapatt did, in fact, have the notebooks, DOOM confronted the manager again.
Alapatt allegedly then told DOOM he got the notebooks because DOOM owed $12,500 in past-due rent, and if someone did not pay it off, the landlord was going to destroy the possessions he left behind. Because Alapatt claims to have paid that rent on DOOM’s behalf, he said that the physical notebooks themselves were legally his property, according the complaint. (Earlier this year, Thompson has come to suspect that DOOM owed no additional rent, and Alapatt simply paid $12,500 to the landlord to buy the books.)
In Summer 2020, Alapatt apparently offered to send DOOM and his family photocopies of the contents of the notebooks for the “sole purpose” of allowing DOOM access but would not give back the physical books themselves. DOOM refused this proposal. In October 2020, shortly before the rapper’s death, the estate says Alapatt sent DOOM a hard drive with large format scans of every notebook he lost, all of which were time stamped between 2018 and March 2020. The lawsuit claims that this proves Alapatt was infringing on his estate’s intellectual property, which is now held by his business entity, Gas Drawls, by creating and disseminating unlawful copies of DOOM’s lyrics.
It is unclear who Alapatt sent these scans to, if anyone, but the lawsuit claims Alapatt was talking to potential buyers, including hip-hop archivists, to sell the notebooks or its copies.
“Although Alapatt has professed that he ‘does not intend to publish’ the unauthorized digital copies he made, he does not have to ‘publish’ the copies of his infringing copies to be liable,” argues the complaint. “Regardless, [DOOM’s estate] alleges that Alapatt actually shared the copies of the notebook he made with others.”
Now, after DOOM’s death, Thompson is intent on getting the notebooks returned to the family, the photo copies destroyed, and “significant compensation” for the damage Alapatt has caused. Along with copyright infringement, the lawsuit alleges “fraud, conversion, unjust enrichment, constructive trust and declaratory relief” and requests a jury trial.
Thompson and Gas Drawls are represented by Miles M. Cooley of Freedman and Taitelman. Alapatt is represented by Kenneth Freundlich of Freundlich Law. Both parties did not immediately return requests for comment on the complaint.
A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit accusing The Rolling Stones members Mick Jagger and Keith Richards of copying their 2020 single “Living in a Ghost Town” from a pair of little-known songs, ruling that the case was clearly filed in the wrong court.
Filed in March by songwriter Sergio Garcia Fernandez (stage name Angelslang), the copyright infringement lawsuit claimed that Jagger and Richards “misappropriated many of the recognizable and key protected elements” from his 2006 song “So Sorry” as well as his 2007 tune “Seed of God.”
But in a decision Wednesday (Oct. 18), Judge Eldon E. Fallon ruled that his Louisiana federal court lacked jurisdiction over Fernandez’s case. In doing so, he pointed out that Jagger and Richards are Brits, Fernandez lives in Spain, and The Rolling Stones have “only performed in New Orleans four times.”
“The mere fact that people in this district listen to the Rolling Stones or the alleged work does not permit this court to wield specific jurisdiction over the defendants,” Judge Fallon wrote in dismissing the case.
The judge only tossed the case “without prejudice” — meaning Fernandez is free to re-file the lawsuit in a more appropriate location. In the lead-up to Wednesday’s ruling, lawyers for The Rolling Stones argued that the case should have been filed somewhere in Europe.
In a statement to Billboard, Fernandez’s lawyer said he’s “disappointed and stunned by the court’s ruling.” But he vowed to “refile the lawsuit in a different venue in addition to reviewing other legal options.”
Released at the peak of the COVID-19 shutdowns in April 2020, “Living in a Ghost Town” was the first original material released by the Stones since 2012. The song, a blues-rock tune with reggae influences accompanied by a COVID-themed video, reached No. 3 on the Hot Rock & Alternative Songs chart in May 2020.
In his lawsuit, Fernandez alleged that the new track was created by borrowing key features from his two earlier songs, including vocal melodies, chord progressions and other elements. “Defendants never paid plaintiff, nor secured the authorization for the use of ‘So Sorry’ and ‘Seed of God,’” his lawyers wrote at the time.
How would members of the iconic band have heard those songs, which have less than 1,000 spins on Spotify? Fernandez claims he gave a demo CD to “an immediate family member” of Jagger.
“The immediate family member … confirmed receipt … to the plaintiff via e-mail, and expressed that the musical works of the plaintiff and its style was a sound The Rolling Stones would be interested in using,” Fernandez’s lawyers wrote.
When the case was first filed, experts told Billboard that it was unlikely to succeed. Joe Bennett, a forensic musicologist and a professor at Berklee College of Music, said the songs shared only an overall vibe — based on mid-tempo rock grooves in the key of A minor — that’s been ubiquitous in rock and blues since the beginning.
“The Stones didn’t copy from Fernandez, because they didn’t need to,” Bennett said. “They’ve been playing grooves like this for a very long time, as have many others.”
The RIAA has asked to have AI voice cloning added to the government’s piracy watch list, officially known as the Review of Notorious Markets for Counterfeiting and Piracy.
The RIAA typically writes in each year, requesting forms of piracy like torrenting, stream ripping, cyber lockers and free music downloading to be included in the final list. All of these categories of piracy are still present in the RIAA’s letter to the U.S. Trade Representative this year, but this is the first time the trade organization, which represents the interest of record labels, has added a form of generative AI to their recommendations.
The RIAA noted that it believes AI voice cloning, also referred to as ‘AI voice synthesis’ or ‘AI voice filters,’ infringes on their members’ copyrights and the artists’ rights to their voices and calls out one U.S.-based AI voice cloning site, Voicify.AI as one that should specifically face scrutiny.
According to the letter, Voicify.AI’s service includes voice models that emulate sound recording artists like Michael Jackson, Justin Bieber, Ariana Grande, Taylor Swift, Elvis Presley, Bruno Mars, Eminem, Harry Styles, Adele, Ed Sheeran, and others, as well as political figures including Donald Trump, Joe Biden, and Barak Obama.
The RIAA claims that this type of service infringes on copyrights because it “stream-rips the YouTube video selected by the user, copies the acapella from the track, modifies the acapella using the AI vocal model, and then provides the user unauthorized copies of the modified acapella stem, the underlying instrumental bed, and the modified remixed recording.” Essentially, some of these AI voice cloning sites train its models on stolen copyrights.
It additionally claims that there is a violation pf the artists’ right of publicity, the right that protects public figures from having their name, likeness, and voice commercially exploited without their permission. This is a more tenuous right, given it is only a state-level protection and its strength varies by state. It also becomes more limited after a public figure’s death. However, this is possibly the most common legal argument against AI voice cloning technology in the music business.
This form of artificial intelligence first became widely recognized last spring, when an anonymous TikTok user named Ghostwriter used AI to mimic the voices of Drake and The Weeknd in his song “Heart On My Sleeve” with shocking precision. The song was briefly available on streaming services, like YouTube, but was taken down after a stern letter from the artists’ label, Universal Music Group. However, the song was ultimately removed from official services due to a copyright infringement in the track, not because of a right of publicity claim.
A few months later, Billboard reported that streamers were in talks with the three major label groups about allowing them to file take down requests for right of publicity violations — something which previously was only allowed in cases of copyright infringement as dictated in the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA). Unlike the DMCA, the newly discussed arrangement regarding right of publicity issues would be a voluntary one. In July, UMG’s general counsel and executive vp of business and legal affairs, Jeffery Harleston, spoke as a witness in a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on AI and copyright and asked for a new “federal right of publicity” to be made into law to protect artists’ voices.
An additional challenge in regulating this area is that many AI models available on the internet for global users are not based in the U.S., meaning the U.S. government has little recourse to stop their alleged piracy, even if alerted by trade organizations like the RIAA. Certain countries are known to be more relaxed on AI regulation — like China, Israel, South Korea, Japan, and Singapore — which has created safe havens for AI companies to grow abroad.
The U.S. Trade Representative still must review this letter from the RIAA as well as other recommendations from other industry groups and determine whether or not they believe AI voice cloning should be included on the watchlist. The office will likely issue their final review at the start of next year.
As listeners continue to dissect Drake’s new album For All the Dogs, English synth-pop duo Pet Shop Boys are calling out the MC for interpolating their 1986 song “West End Girls” on “All the Parties” without proper credit or permission. The lyrics in question come when Drake sings, “And it’s 6, our town a dead end world/ […]
The yearslong legal battle over Ed Sheeran‘s “Thinking Out Loud” has officially drawn to a close. The heirs of Ed Townsend, co-writer on Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On”, who sued Sheeran in 2016 for allegedly infringing the classic song in his smash 2014 single, have officially dropped their appeal in the long-running case, according […]
Even if you don’t know the name or the backstory, you probably know the sound: Boom-ch-boom-chick, boom-ch-boom-chick, boom-ch-boom-chick. Listen to pretty much any reggaetón song, and you’ll hear that infectious percussion — dubbed the dembow rhythm — playing underneath. That single key element, a historian of the genre once wrote, “underpins the vast majority of reggaetón tracks as an almost required sonic signpost.”
There was nothing controversial about that fact until 2021, when lawyers for the Jamaican duo Steely & Clevie — Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and the estate of the late Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson — filed a copyright lawsuit over the origins of dembow. In it, they argued that the rhythm was ultimately derived from a single song, called “Fish Market,” that the pair wrote in 1989.
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When it was first filed, the lawsuit targeted only two tracks and a few artists. But the implication was clear: if their argument was valid, hundreds of artists across reggaetón — a genre that has risen from an underground fusion of rap, dancehall and reggae in the clubs of San Juan, Puerto, Rico, to the very apex of the music industry in the past decade — would also have infringed Steely & Clevie’s intellectual property.
Now, two years later, those stakes are no longer theoretical. The duo’s lawyers are suing more than 150 different artists, including Bad Bunny, Karol G, Pitbull, Drake, Daddy Yankee, Luis Fonsi and Justin Bieber, plus units of all three major music companies. They claim that over 1,800 reggaetón songs featuring iterations of the dembow rhythm were, at root, illegally copied from “Fish Market” — and that their clients deserve monetary compensation for them.
If that sounds both unusual and potentially disruptive to you, music law experts would agree.
“This case is jaw-dropping — the plaintiffs are suing over a hundred artists for over a thousand songs, 30 years after the release of their song,” says Jennifer Jenkins, a professor at Duke University School of Law who has written a history of musical borrowing and regulation. “If they win, this would confer a monopoly over an entire genre, something unprecedented in music copyright litigation.”
Musical pioneers
Legal claims aside, nobody really disputes that the genealogy of dembow leads back to Steely & Clevie, a legendary duo who are widely credited with playing an influential role in the evolution of Jamaican music. When Steely died in 2009, The New York Times said he had perhaps “participated in more sessions than anyone else in the history of reggae.”
According to most experts, the story goes like this: Aspects of Steely & Clevie’s “Fish Market” were incorporated into a 1990 song called “Dem Bow” by the artist Shabba Ranks, which itself was then re-used by producer Dennis “The Menace” Thompson in another 1990 song called “Dub Mix II.” It was this track that was then heavily sampled and interpolated in the early days of reggaetón, providing an essential rhythmic element to the nascent genre. According to an article by Wayne Marshall, a historian of Caribbean music and a professor at Berklee College of Music, that portion from “Dub Mix II” has since “provided the basis for hundreds if not thousands of other tracks.”
Over the decades that followed, reggaetón blossomed into a global sensation. With roots in the Panamanian “reggae en espanol” movement and then evolving with Puerto Rican trailblazers like Ivy Queen and DJ Nelson, reggaetón exploded onto the world stage with Daddy Yankee’s 2004 breakout single, “Gasolina,” which spent 20 weeks on the Hot 100. The genre then rose to new heights in 2017 with Luis Fonsi’s mega-hit “Despacito,” which topped the Hot 100 for a record-tying 16 weeks. And last year, Bad Bunny’s Un Verano Sin Ti became the first Latin album to finish as the No. 1 Billboard 200 album of the year after ruling the chart for 13 nonconsecutive weeks. According to Billboard Boxscore, he also grossed a record-setting $435 million across two tours — El Último Tour del Mundo and World’s Hottest Tour — cementing his place as one of pop’s biggest stars.
All of it, according to Steely & Clevie’s lawsuit, on the backs of their intellectual property.
A growing case
The duo first headed to federal court April 2021, accusing Panamanian reggaetón artist and producer El Chombo of infringing “Fish Market” with his “Dame tu Cosita,” a 2018 hit that reached No. 36 on the Hot 100. The suit also named Karol G and Pitbull, who later released a remix of the track.
In their complaint, the lawyers for Steely & Clevie said the “primary rhythm and drum sections” of “Dame tu Cosita” were pulled directly from the earlier song: “At no point did defendants seek or obtain authorization from plaintiffs to use ‘Fish Market’ in connection with the infringing works.”
When the case was first filed, few people took notice. But the lawsuit quickly grew. In October 2021, Steely & Clevie added 10 more songs to the case, including Fonsi’s “Despacito.” In May 2022, they alleged that an additional 44 songs had infringed “Fish Market,” including Daddy Yankee’s “Gasolina.” By September 2022, the lawsuit had ballooned: More than 150 total defendant-artists, including Bad Bunny, accused of releasing a staggering 1,800 infringing songs.
The newer versions of the lawsuit also claimed broader intellectual property rights. In the original, Steely & Clevie claimed only to own a copyright to “Fish Market” itself; as the case evolved, they claimed they also owned rights to “Dem Bow” and “Dub Mix II,” the later songs that utilized “Fish Market.”
In the most recent version of the complaint, filed in April, it takes a full 25 pages to list out all of the defendants, which also include units of Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. Other notable defendants include Anitta, Becky G, Maluma, Tainy, Rauw Alejandro, and Enrique Iglesias, as well as companies BMG Rights Management, Hipgnosis and Kobalt.
Over a whopping 228 pages, the document lays out how each song, like “Despacito,” allegedly infringed what it calls “groundbreaking” drum and bass patterns in the earlier songs.
“The rhythm section of ‘Despacito’ and the ‘Despacito Remix’ copies original elements of the ‘Fish Market’ rhythm section,” Steely & Clevie’s lawyers wrote. “The musical backbones of ‘Despacito’ and the ‘Despacito Remix’ are substantially similar, if not virtually identical, to ‘Fish Market.’”
“Monopolistic”? Or “sensationalist”?
A trial on all those allegations is still years away, even in the fastest scenario. But this past summer, the attorneys representing the artists and labels have been trying to make sure it never gets there.
In a motion filed in June, Bad Bunny’s lawyer Kenneth D. Freundlich demanded that the case be dismissed immediately, calling it a “transparent” attempt by Steely & Clevie to “stake monopolistic control over the reggaetón genre.”
“Plaintiffs’ [lawsuit] impermissibly seeks to monopolize practically the entire reggaetón musical genre for themselves by claiming copyright ownership of certain legally irrelevant and/or unprotectable, purported musical composition elements,” Freundlich wrote for his superstar client.
When the lawsuit’s allegations are “defrocked” of their “façade,” Bad Bunny’s lawyer wrote, all that is left is a simple rhythm itself — and “courts have been consistent in finding rhythm to be unprotectable.”
The majority of the other defendants named in Steely & Clevie’s lawsuit (including Anitta, Pitbull, Karol G, Ricky Martin, Daddy Yankee, Fonsi, Bieber, units of all three majors and more than 70 other defendants) are represented by a single team of lawyers from the law firm Pryor Cashman. That’s the same firm, and some of the same lawyers, that won Ed Sheeran’s big copyright trial in May.
In their motion, the Pryor lawyers echoed Bad Bunny’s genre-monopoly arguments, but they also claimed that the size of the case had turned it into a procedural disaster — a confusing mess in which nobody knows exactly what they’re accused of doing wrong. They said Steely & Clevie had failed to satisfy “the fundamental elements of a copyright infringement claim.”
“The [complaint] is a ‘shotgun pleading’ filled with conclusory allegations that lump defendants together, making it impossible for defendants to determine what each is alleged to have done, what works are at issue and what in those works is allegedly infringing,” the attorneys wrote.
In their own response filings, Steely & Clevie remained undeterred. In an August filing, they argued that the gripes about the size and complexity of the case were unfounded — and that the scale of the lawsuit actually underscored the central point of their allegations.
“While the copyists are legion here, they certainly did copy, and the sheer amount of copying proves the creative and original nature of plaintiffs’ work,” wrote the duo’s lawyers from the Los Angeles-based law firm Doniger/Burroughs. “Defendants want to exploit plaintiffs’ creativity to build careers and reap financial success while denying plaintiffs their just credit and compensation.”
And in a separate response to Bad Bunny’s filing, Steely & Clevie’s attorneys blasted the accusation that they were aiming to own an entire genre of music.
“In the end, Bad Bunny’s motion boils down to a sensationalist, unsupported suggestion that this case somehow ties up the reggaetón genre. Not so,” the duo’s lawyers wrote. “To be sure, the unauthorized copying of the Fish Market pattern now is widespread — copying that necessitated this case. But Bad Bunny cites no authority for the proposition that widespread copying of an original work somehow renders that work unprotectable.”
A hearing before a federal judge, where those arguments will be tested in open court, is set for Friday. Attorneys for both sides declined to comment.
“A pretty wild claim”
With just about every artist in one of the industry’s hottest genres now facing the possibility of copyright liability over a core part of their music, Steely & Clevie’s case could pose something of an existential problem for reggaetón. Artists who want to make songs in the future featuring a similar rhythm would need to ask (and pay for) permission to do so for decades to come — that is, if the case is ultimately successful.
Some copyright experts are skeptical. “This is a case that zeros in on a particular beat that characterizes an entire genre, and they’re basically saying, you can trace it all back to our song, and a piece of everything that flows from that belongs to us,” says Peter DiCola, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law who has written extensively about music sampling. “I think that’s a pretty wild claim.”
Part of what makes the “Fish Market” case unusual is the long delay. Steely & Clevie waited 30 years to sue, as an entire world of music built up around a rhythm that they now claim to own — no doubt leading some reggaetón artists to think, perhaps reasonably, that dembow was fair game.
But even if that delay seems vaguely unfair, it’s probably not a great defense. In a 2014 case over the movie Raging Bull, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that there are essentially no time limits to bringing a copyright suit. That decision directly sparked a battle over Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven” decades after it was released, as well as many other lawsuits over years-old allegations of infringement.
Instead, the harder questions posed by Steely & Clevie’s case concern the dividing line between historical acknowledgment and exclusive legal ownership. Music historians don’t doubt that Steely & Clevie played a key role in reggaetón’s evolution, but does that entitle them, decades later, to control a crucial part of an entire genre? Put another way, the real question — and it’s potentially a multi-billion-dollar question — is whether they can claim a copyright on the dembow rhythm.
In the abstract, sure. Rhythms are just collections of sounds arranged creatively, like the melodies and lyrics that are clearly covered by copyrights. But in reality, U.S. courts have been hesitant to extend protection to musical elements like rhythms, chord progressions and song structures. Earlier cases have declared them either simply too unoriginal for copyright coverage, or ruled they are “scènes à faire” — a copyright law term for stock elements of a given genre that anyone is entitled to use.
Recent legal battles over music have been dismissed with rulings that the accuser could not claim a monopoly on basic “building blocks” of songs. Led Zeppelin won a case involving “Stairway to Heaven” in 2020, followed by a similar decision in 2022 on Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse.” In May, a federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that accused Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” of infringing Marvin Gaye’s “Let’s Get It On” saying the case — over a chord progression and harmonic rhythm – was seeking an “impermissible monopoly over a basic musical building block.”
Legal experts wonder if the claims about dembow may face similar limitations.
“All credit to them for being really talented musicians,” DiCola says. “But this thing that they’ve created, this common element that runs through as kind of the DNA of these reggaetón tracks — is that really something anyone can own? To me, it seems very much like a basic building block.”