Legal

Daddy Yankee, Karol G and dozens of other artists are asking a federal judge to toss out a sprawling copyright lawsuit that claims “Despacito” and hundreds of other reggaeton tracks infringed a single 1989 song, arguing the accusers are “effectively claiming ownership of an entire genre of music.”
The case, filed by Jamaican duo Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson, claims that their 1989 song “Fish Market” has been sampled or interpolated into more than 1,800 songs in the years since it was released — and that each one amounts to an act of copyright infringement.

But in a motion filed Thursday (June 15), attorneys for the accused infringers finally struck back — arguing that after “30 years of inaction,” Clevie & Steely were unfairly trying to monopolize a whole style of popular music.

“Plaintiffs [are] effectively claiming ownership of an entire genre of music by claiming exclusive rights to the rhythm and other unprotectable musical elements common to all ‘reggaeton’-style songs,” wrote lawyers from Pryor Cashman, the same law firm that just won Ed Sheeran’s big trial with similar arguments.

First filed in 2021, the enormous lawsuit names more than 150 defendants, including “Despacito” stars Daddy Yankee, Luis Fonsi and Justin Bieber as well as Bad Bunny, Anitta, Pitbull, Karol G, Ricky Martin, El Chombo and many other artists, plus units of all three major music companies. The case claims that “Fish Market,” and several other songs that directly copied it, formed the basis for the “dembow” rhythm that’s been used in countless reggaeton songs in the years since.

But in Thursday’s response, lawyers from Pryor Cashman (who represent 89 of those defendants) said the size of the case had made it a procedural disaster — a confusing mess in which nobody knows exactly what they’re accused of doing wrong. Without those specific allegations, they said Clevie & Steely 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.

The lawyers for Daddy Yankee and the other defendants also sharply criticized the length of time that elapsed before bringing the case. The U.S. Supreme Court has said that copyright cases can usually be filed even decades later, but Thursday’s filing said that Clevie & Steely’s case pushed that system to its breaking point.

“Plaintiffs neither filed any action nor registered any copyrights until 2020 — at least thirty years after the creation of the works,” the lawyers for the accused artists wrote. “These failures constitute misleading inaction, during which an entire genre of reggaeton music developed, which plaintiffs now claim to own.”

An attorney for Clevie & Steely did not immediately return a request for comment on Friday.

Despite being filed in 2021, the case over “Fish Market” is still in the earliest stages, thanks in no small part to the procedural complexity of a lawsuit involving scores of defendants and hundreds of songs. If Thursday’s motion is denied, the case will proceed into discovery, where both sides will exchange evidence, and head toward an eventual trial. But such a resolution could still be years away.

Lawyers for Sony Music Entertainment have spent months trying to find a TikTok rapper who the label is suing for copyright infringement, even going to his mom’s house on Mother’s Day “in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her.” Now, a judge now says they can just slide into his DMs.
In an order issued Wednesday, Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that Sony had exhausted all reasonable routes to locate Trefuego — the artist behind a popular TikTok song called “90mh,” which Sony claims features a “flagrant” unlicensed sample from an earlier song.

Faced with that situation, the judge said Sony’s lawyers could instead reach out to his Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Soundcloud accounts, which have remained active since Sony filed its lawsuit.

“Plaintiffs have shown that serving process via these social media platforms will be reasonably effective in giving Trefuego notice of this suit,” Judge Pittman wrote.

Sony has been pursuing Trefuego in some form since January 2021, when the company notified him that his “90mh” — a track that’s been featured in 155,000 videos on TikTok and streamed 100 million times on Spotify — was built on an illegal sample from Japanese composer Toshifumi Hinata. After filing takedown requests in August 2022 to get the song pulled, Sony finally launched a lawsuit in December.

Wednesday’s ruling highlights the extraordinary lengths that litigants like Sony must sometimes go to “serve” filings on opponents — a key procedural requirement in any lawsuit.

The same problem recently confronted lawyers repping Kanye West, who desperately wanted to drop the embattled rapper as a client but couldn’t find him to do so. And NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal spent months avoiding a lawsuit over his endorsement of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX — only to finally be located and served at a Heat-Celtics game last month.

In his decision on Sony’s case, Judge Pittman said the company’s lawyers had made “extensive efforts” and “gone to great lengths” to find Trefuego. They made “seven separate attempts” to serve him with the lawsuit, the judge said, including hiring a private investigator and scouring his social media pages.

In one particularly notable effort, Sony’s reps went “to his mother’s house on Mother’s Day in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her” but still came up empty: “Sadly, he was not there, and his own mother claimed she did not know who he was,” the judge wrote.

A typical alternative to in-person service would be to print a notice of the lawsuit in the local papers — the same thing that Kanye’s estranged lawyers wanted to do in his case. But in Wednesday’s decision, Judge Pittman said that “modern problems require modern solutions.”

“This court has concerns as to whether SoundCloud and TikTok rapper extraordinaire Trefuego is a regular reader of the Fort Worth Star Telegram or that he regularly visits the information tab of Fort Worth’s city website,” the judge wrote.

Judge Pittman ruled that Sony could instead use “certain social media accounts” that “most certainly belong to the young bard.” Trefuego’s Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and SoundCloud pages all “appear to be substantially active,” the judge said, and indicate that he is a “frequent user” of those platforms.

Ahead of the decision, Sony had offered one other digital alternative: to email the rapper’s manager, with whom Sony had correspondence over the unlicensed sample before it resorted to litigation. But the judge rejected that route, noting that “all lines of communication have ceased” with the manager since the filing of the case.

“Given his own mother’s willingness to deny her relationship to him, it is not unlikely that his manager would also willingly delete emails or continue to ignore them,” the judge wrote. “Because communications through this line have proven futile already, the Court will not grant service through this already explored dead-end avenue.”