Bad Bunny wins a court ruling over the reggaeton dembow rhythm

Bad Bunny has won the ruling that guts the case against him. A US federal judge has thrown out the copyright theory at the centre of the lawsuit accusing him, Drake and more than 150 other artists of copying the dembow rhythm that runs through reggaeton.

Judge Andre Birotte Jr. ruled on September 1 that the plaintiffs had failed to identify a single copyrighted work of their own containing the combination of elements they are trying to protect. It reverses his own July 1 order, which had left the question of whether the rhythm is protectable for a jury.

Bad Bunny and his label Rimas Entertainment asked him to reconsider on July 15, arguing the combination described does not exist in any one work the plaintiffs own. Drake and OVO Sound lined up behind the motion, as did UMG Recordings, Empire Distribution, Maybach Music Group, Rich Music and Cinq Music Group. Birotte heard argument on August 14 and granted all ten requests to join.

The case dates to 2021, brought by Cleveland "Clevie" Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe "Steely" Johnson, who say their 1989 track Fish Market is the source of the percussion pattern. Their claim covers nearly 2,000 songs, among them "Despacito," "Titi Me Pregunto" and "Dame Tu Cosita."

Birotte's reasoning turns on ownership. The plaintiffs own the Fish Market composition and recording, the Dem Bow composition and the Pounder (Dub Mix II) recording, but not the Pounder composition, and the record does not establish that the two-bar transcription in the complaint exists in any one of them. "Plaintiffs have not clearly identified what copyrighted work contains the allegedly protectable selection and arrangement they seek to enforce," he wrote.

Assembling a work out of pieces of several others, he added, would amount to creating the copyrighted work through the litigation itself. He also held that identifying which work defines the copyright is a question for a judge rather than a jury, and that the scope of a claimed work cannot stay fluid as a case runs.

The order stops short of settling the music. Birotte did not rule on whether the rhythmic elements are original, did not decide the claims over the plaintiffs' sound recordings, and did not touch damages, which Billboard had reported in July ran into the hundreds of millions. The parties have been ordered to meet within 30 days to discuss a schedule for what remains, and he refused a request to send the question straight to the Ninth Circuit.

The reasoning leans on the 2020 appeals decision that cleared Led Zeppelin over "Stairway to Heaven," and fits a run of US rulings narrowing what a rights-holder can claim to own in a song's shared building blocks, Ed Sheeran's two wins over "Thinking Out Loud" among them. The judge had been asked to reconsider weeks earlier.

Bad Bunny is fighting other claims at the same time, including a Puerto Rico case over a voice tag and a separate suit over vocals on two tracks. He was Spotify's most-streamed artist globally in 2025, with more than 19.8 billion streams, which is part of why a ruling about a latin rhythm pattern carried the exposure it did.