Judge weighs reconsidering ruling in Bad Bunny reggaeton copyright case

Lawyers for Bad Bunny, Drake and a long list of reggaeton stars faced off against attorneys for reggae duo Steely & Clevie in a Los Angeles courtroom, asking U.S. District Judge Andre Birotte Jr. to reconsider a ruling he issued in July. That ruling found a jury must decide whether roughly 1,800 reggaeton songs by more than 100 artists infringed the composition copyright held by Cleveland "Clevie" Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe "Steely" Johnson for their 1989 song "Fish Market," which the plaintiffs argue originated reggaeton's signature dembow rhythm.

Bad Bunny's lead lawyer, Kenneth Freundlich, argued the pattern the judge found potentially protectable, referred to in the case as the "Fish Market Elements," was actually assembled from separate, unconnected pieces of different songs, calling it a "pastiche." He pointed to testimony from Clevie Browne describing the disputed two-bar pattern as made up of two bars that don't appear together in "Fish Market" itself, one from the song's opening measure and the other from bar 22. "It's our position that a selection arrangement can't be based on a pastiche of compositions," Freundlich told the court. "They took something from here and something from there, and they put it together as if it was continuous."

Freundlich pushed the technical argument further, noting that the two-bar timbale loop at issue actually appears only in a related song, "Pounder (Dub Mix II)," which doesn't contain the tambourine element also identified as protectable in "Fish Market." He also pointed out that Steely & Clevie don't hold the composition copyright to "Pounder" at all, only to its sound recording; that copyright belongs to Jamaican producer Dennis "the Menace" Halliburton, who isn't a party to the case.

Judge Birotte pressed the plaintiffs' side on how they could reconcile claiming the pattern exists in "Fish Market" itself when testimony showed the timbale figure came from two separate portions of the song. Plaintiffs' lawyer Benjamin Tookey answered that a "consecutive two-bar timbale pattern" does exist in one place in the composition, and that it was simply repeated "at different times" in the song. Freundlich shot back that it was "the first time we've heard them say that the two-measure pattern is in 'Fish Market,'" arguing it directly contradicted the plaintiffs' own client's sworn testimony.

Plaintiffs' lawyer Stephen Doniger pushed back on that framing directly: "No one's Frankenstein-ing anything." He compared the disputed pattern to repeating a slice of a recognizable Monet painting and calling the result a "Monet remix," arguing the real dispute is simply whether that two-bar slice comes out of "Fish Market" at all. Judge Birotte opened the hearing by noting he was being asked to "mull this nightmare over some more," and closed it by taking the matter under submission, telling the lawyers a ruling would likely take a few weeks.

Freundlich argued that letting the case proceed to trial as is would be unworkable, given that discovery would touch roughly 1,800 songs by artists including Karol G, Anitta, Pitbull, Justin Bieber and Daddy Yankee, a process he said could stretch into 2035. Bad Bunny has denied infringing Steely & Clevie's work on dozens of his own songs, including "Titi Me Pregunto," "Un Ratito" and "Una Vez," and the case will continue regardless on separate claims involving allegedly unauthorized samples of the duo's sound recordings.

The legal fight is playing out even as the artists named in it stay busy elsewhere. Bad Bunny is closing out his world tour with a run of home shows in Puerto Rico, while co-defendant Karol G has just released her seventh album, No Me Arrepiento de Sentir Tanto. The case remains one of the more closely watched in Latin music, given how many artists' catalogs it touches.