A Timeline of the Reggaeton Lawsuit Bad Bunny Won

Five years ago, a copyright suit threatened to shake reggaeton’s foundations—and its future—implicating some of the genre’s biggest acts, including Bad Bunny, Karol G, Daddy Yankee, and more. It has now reached a new conclusion, with a decision siding with El Movimiento and the Latine artists, per a news article first reported by Billboard.

The lawsuit sought to claim ownership of the dembow rhythm, the foundational beat that defines reggaeton and adjacent styles. Bad Bunny’s legal team helped overturn what could have dealt a major blow to an entire musical culture.

Here’s how the case unfolded:

In 2021, Cleveland “Clevie” Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson—the Jamaican reggae duo Steely & Clevie—filed a lawsuit claiming that their 1989 song “Fish Market” was the ultimate source of the dembow rhythm. They sought to enforce copyright claims against a vast catalog of reggaeton recordings, raising concerns that the case could effectively give them control over elements of an entire genre.

In July 2026, after years of litigation, federal Judge André Birotte Jr. ruled that a jury would have to determine whether the musical arrangement underlying the dembow rhythm could be protected by copyright. That decision meant the sprawling lawsuit could proceed to trial.

Then, in August, Bad Bunny’s legal team pushed the judge to reconsider, arguing that Steely & Clevie were effectively combining musical elements from multiple songs to construct the allegedly protected rhythm. Their argument characterized the claim as a “Frankenstein copyright.”

Yesterday (Tuesday, Sept. 1), in an unusual move, Judge Birotte overturned his earlier ruling and dismissed the case’s central copyright theory. He concluded that the plaintiffs had failed to identify a single copyrighted work containing the specific selection and arrangement they claimed to own. The judge emphasized that copyright law does not protect an “abstract amalgamation” of elements pulled from multiple independently existing works. In other words, similarities assembled across several songs cannot simply be combined after the fact to create a copyright claim.

Bad Bunny’s attorney Kenneth D. Freundlich, as reported by the above-cited Billboard article, stated that the judge “saw this case for what it was. You cannot copyright a rhythm by reverse-engineering it from three different songs once you’re already in court. Copyright protects what an artist actually created, not a collage assembled in litigation. That is what the court rejected today.”

The ruling represents a major victory for Bad Bunny and the other defendants and ends a significant portion of the lawsuit. Some claims involving alleged direct sampling of Steely & Clevie’s sound recordings remain. Still, those are considerably narrower than the broader attempt to establish ownership over the compositional elements of dembow.