Landmark Reggaeton Copyright Case to Be Decided by Jury, Judge Rules

The Riddim on Trial

The mechanics are simple enough to follow. Steely & Clevie — the late Wycliffe "Steely" Johnson's estate and Cleveland "Clevie" Browne — trace modern reggaeton's rhythmic spine back to their 1989 track "Fish Market," a production built around a syncopated groove that became the template for the dembow riddim. Their argument is surgical: that pattern was authored, not inherited. Defense attorneys counter that the dembow descends from the habanera, a cadence with centuries of pre-existing history, meaning no one can claim ownership over a building block that predates any of these recordings. Birotte read both expert reports as "facially credible" — judicial language for: I can't pick a winner from the briefing room. So the jury gets the call.

Why Hip-Hop Should Be Watching

The defendant list is a cultural roll call that crosses every genre boundary hip-hop currently operates in. Bad Bunny, Karol G, Daddy Yankee, Drake, Pitbull, Justin Bieber, Luis Fonsi — plus the corporate entities behind all three major labels. Every one of those artists sits inside a production pipeline where riddims get flipped, chopped, pitched, and redeployed until the original source is folklore. If Steely & Clevie's team convinces a jury that "Fish Market" qualifies as an original, protectable work — their experts identified "seven discrete elements" in patterns they claim no prior recording contains — the settlement leverage alone reshapes how producers price their loop catalogs. Every producer I know with a hard drive full of breaks is refreshing PACER this week.

What to Track

The next phase is an infringement discovery round, and this is where the depositions get interesting. Plaintiffs have to demonstrate that defendants had access to "Fish Market" and copied it in specific tracks — named examples include "Despacito," "Tití Me Preguntó," and "Dame Tu Cosita." Plaintiffs' attorney Stephen Doniger called the ruling a "mixed result" but said he finds it "hard to imagine how any jury could find the Dem Bow Riddim to be anything other than an original and protectable work." Translation for the culture: the architects of reggaeton's foundation are betting a jury agrees that authorship has a paper trail. Don't expect a verdict this calendar year — but expect major-label legal teams to quietly audit their reggaeton-adjacent catalogs, and watch for the first deposition request that names a rapper's producer by name. That's when this stops being a reggaeton story and starts being everyone's problem.