Judge reverses himself in reggaeton copyright suit that alleged 1,800 infringing songs

The scoreline first: a reversal. On September 1, U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. undid his own earlier ruling and kept the composition-copyright claims in the reggaeton dembow case away from a jury. CelebrityAccess, reporting the order the following day, said the reversal turned on the plaintiffs' failure to identify a specific copyrighted musical arrangement they said had been copied across the genre. It lands in a suit that, as Rolling Stone AU/NZ reported, alleged approximately 1,800 songs infringed the copyright.

The result is easy to write up. The reason is where the coverage thins out, and the reason is the whole story.

The claim

The case was filed in 2021 by Jamaican producer Cleveland "Clevie" Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe "Steely" Johnson, and Consequence reported that it targeted more than 150 artists, among them Karol G, Daddy Yankee, J Balvin, Drake and Luis Fonsi. The producers' contention, as CelebrityAccess described it, was that their 1989 recording "Fish Market" carried the dembow rhythm that reggaeton was later built on - the pattern under an enormous share of the genre's catalogue.

A bare rhythm is thin ground to stand on, so the plaintiffs' available route was selection and arrangement: ownership not of the individual elements, which nobody claims are novel on their own, but of the particular way those elements were put together in one work. Steely & Clevie's attorney Stephen Doniger maintains that a genuine factual dispute exists about whether that sequence exists within "Fish Market," according to Law Commentary. That is the plaintiffs' case in a sentence, and it is a factual question - the kind a jury normally answers.

The defense went at the premise rather than the facts. Bad Bunny's attorney Kenneth Freundlich, quoted by Consequence, put it this way: "You cannot copyright a rhythm by reverse-engineering it from three different songs once you're already in court." Law Commentary reported that Freundlich characterized the plaintiffs' approach as assembling a "Frankenstein" from separate musical elements, and that the defense contended the "Fish Market Elements" do not form a continuous passage in that single composition - that they were drawn instead from different sections of "Fish Market" and from a second work, "Pounder (Dub Mix II)." Rolling Stone AU/NZ reported the defense's parallel argument that the identified material amounted to a pastiche pulled from different portions of different songs, which copyright law does not protect.

The record

One sentence from the order reached the coverage, and it is carried word for word by two outlets that did not source it from each other. Birotte, per CelebrityAccess and Rolling Stone AU/NZ alike, wrote that the plaintiffs had not clearly identified which copyrighted work contains the protectable selection and arrangement they were trying to enforce. Rolling Stone AU/NZ reported that the judge agreed with the defense that plaintiffs must point to "a single copyrighted work" rather than combine elements drawn from several compositions.

CelebrityAccess reported that the ruling removes a substantial portion of the litigation, while narrower claims alleging direct sampling of Steely & Clevie-owned sound recordings "remain active." That distinction is not decoration. The composition claim and the sampling claim are different animals: one asks who owns an arrangement, the other asks whether a specific recording was lifted.

The statutory backdrop explains why identification was load-bearing. Title 17 U.S.C. § 102(b), as published by the U.S. Copyright Office, states that copyright in a work of authorship never extends to "any idea, procedure, process, system, method of operation, concept, principle, or discovery," however it is embodied. The Copyright Office's registration regulation at 37 CFR § 202.1 runs the same line through the filing cabinet, listing "Ideas, plans, methods, systems, or devices" among the material that cannot be registered at all. A rhythmic scheme, standing alone, sits close to that exclusion. Selection and arrangement is the doctrine that lets a plaintiff assemble unprotectable pieces into something protectable - but only as expressed in a work. Name the work, or there is nothing to compare the 1,800 accused songs against.

Analysis: what the quoted sentence reaches

Analysis, on the cited record only. Consequence's account has Birotte rejecting "claims of ownership over the dembow rhythm" - a framing that reads as a verdict on the music. The sentence the same order supplies is narrower than that. It is about identification: which registered work embodies the thing being enforced. On its own terms the quoted sentence does not reach whether the dembow is original, does not reach whether rhythm is categorically protectable, and does not resolve whether "Fish Market" contains anything worth protecting. A failure to name the work is a different kind of loss than a finding that there was nothing to name, and the difference decides what a refiling or an appeal would have to fix.

There is also an arithmetic gap worth flagging rather than smoothing over. Freundlich's quoted line describes reverse-engineering from three different songs. The defense position as described by Law Commentary names two works - "Fish Market" and "Pounder (Dub Mix II)." No excerpt held by this desk names a third. The gap may be a counsel's rounding or a source's compression; on the material available it cannot be closed, and it is reported here as open.

The timing of the hearing has to be marked the same way. Law Commentary's account carries no date in the excerpt held here. Its report that Birotte questioned both sides and had taken the matter under submission, expecting to need several weeks, places it before the September 1 order by inference, not by a datestamp.

The argument that never got its answer

DancehallMag, in a piece its own URL dates to June 7, 2024, canvassed the musicologists after Birotte first cleared the case for trial, and found them split. Music copyright expert Brian McBrearty was skeptical, saying "rhythm elements by themselves are not very protectable to begin with. This one is both brief and straightforward" - and warning that a monopoly over a basic rhythm would cut against copyright's purpose. Ethnomusicologist Ewan Simpson took the other side, allowing that "if sufficient creativity can be identified such that the rhythmic composition is unmistakably unique, it may well be worthy of protection."

Two years on, neither of them got a ruling. The composition claims went out on a question about paperwork, not about music. The originality fight that both experts were preparing for was never held.

What a reader can check next is on the docket rather than in the coverage. The composition theory failed on identification, so the first thing to watch is whether the plaintiffs come back naming one registered work, or take the point up on appeal. The second is the part CelebrityAccess says is still standing: the direct-sampling claims over Steely & Clevie's own recordings, which turn on specific tracks rather than on the genre.

A falsifiable call, on the cited record: absent a successful reconsideration or appeal, the live portion of this case on December 1, 2026 will be those sampling claims, not the composition claims covering the roughly 1,800 songs the suit named. If the composition theory is back before the court by that date, this piece got it wrong.