When the NFL announced that Puerto Rican megastar Bad Bunny would headline this weekend’s Super Bowl halftime show, the outrage from the political right was immediate. Donald Trump called the choice “terrible” and “ridiculous,” and Turning Point USA, the late Charlie Kirk’s political organization, announced an “All-American” halftime alternative (starring Kid Rock, of course, who, unlike Bad Bunny, doesn’t sing in Spanish).

In addition to being a vocal critic of Trump’s immigration policies—the Grammys crowd roared when he took an acceptance-speech dig at ICE—Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio is also the most famous face of reggaeton, the global music phenomenon filling stadiums and topping charts. Now, a group claiming ownership of the genre’s beginnings is pursuing a blockbuster infringement suit that could impact the stars of Latin urban music. Representatives of the Jamaican production team Steely & Clevie are alleging that well over a hundred reggaeton hits borrow wholesale from the duo’s pioneering 1989 B-side “Fish Market” and two related tracks—Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow,” and “Pounder Dub Mix II.” The list of defendants reads like a Latin Grammys roll call: Daddy Yankee, Luis Fonsi, Pitbull, and Bad Bunny himself, represented by Ken Freundlich.

Reggaeton emerged in the U.S. in the club scene in the 1990s, when Puerto Rican producers fused Jamaican dance hall beats with Spanish-language rap, anchored by the syncopated backbone of dembow. Stars like Don Omar, Karol G, and Ozuna consistently rack up 50 million or so monthly listeners each on Spotify. Steely & Clevie’s copyright infringement case has been simmering since 2022, when a California federal judge consolidated several lawsuits and authorized discovery on a key threshold question: Is Steely & Clevie’s claimed musical innovation sufficiently original, and protectable enough, to support a copyright claim?

After years of quiet discovery, we’re now in the critical summary judgment phase. The plaintiffs say the defense has failed to identify any other recognizable musical ancestor of their so-called “holistic music design.” Lawyers for the artists counter that Steely & Clevie are simply claiming authorship over a combination of commonplace habanera grooves and surf beats, not the sort of thing the Copyright Act was built to protect. That prompted a pointed rebuttal from plaintiff’s attorney Stephen Doniger at a recent hearing; Doniger argued that treating rhythm as inherently unoriginal was indulging in a “Eurocentric” framework, one that privileges melody while discounting non-Western musical traditions.

If the plaintiffs prevail, the consequences could be seismic: hundreds of millions in damages, a licensing reshuffle across the reggaeton ecosystem, and a new blueprint for claiming rights over rhythmic patterns. Others, of course, would see such a ruling as the privatization of what has long been shared musical infrastructure. The decision will land any day now.

The reggaeton case centers on a notoriously tricky corner of copyright law, “selection and arrangement”—a term we’ll be hearing more often, thanks to all the A.I. suits on the horizon. (One unresolved legal question with A.I. is how to evaluate pattern learning, when the output isn’t a literal copy of any single work but a complex echo of what came before.) The idea is that while the individual building blocks of a work may be unprotectable, the way they’re curated and combined can be. Steely & Clevie, for instance, claim their music’s rhythmic architecture qualifies as protectable expression.

At a recent hearing on the reggaeton case, Judge André Birotte Jr. repeatedly pressed counsel to articulate what precisely Steely & Clevie claim to own. After all, the judge noted, the asserted rhythmic structure is not contained neatly within a single work, but instead spread across three different songs. That prompted Freundlich, on behalf of Bad Bunny, to complain that the plaintiffs were “basically trying to create Frankenstein,” stitching together a protectable work out of noncontiguous parts.

Birotte’s ruling may turn on the legal precedent demanding that courts filter out non-protectable elements, such as, say, generic grooves, instrumentation choices, and two-bar repeating loops, before deciding whether copying occurred. The defendants argue for removing the unprotectable pieces first, then deciding whether the remaining expression is sufficiently original to deserve copyright protection. The plaintiffs counter that such early pretrial filtering amounts to impermissible “splintering,” destroying the very structure they say the law should protect.

A fresh opinion from the Ninth Circuit may influence whether the reggaeton case reaches a jury. At the very least, it boosts the odds of Bad Bunny and other defendants. In the summer of 2022, the family of journalist Ehud Yonay, whose 1983 magazine article inspired Top Gun, sued Paramount, the producer of Top Gun: Maverick, for failing to license Yonay’s work for the sequel. But the judges ruled that when faced with shared but unprotectable elements—pilots in a communal world, grueling training, barroom bravado, etcetera—the leftover overlapping territory couldn’t sustain an infringement claim. Crucially, the panel explained that even under a selection-and-arrangement theory, courts must first strip away unprotected ideas, facts, and stock elements before asking whether the remainder reflects a protectable pattern or design.

Defendants in the reggaeton case rushed that opinion to Birotte, though trying to claim ownership over an entire genre’s rhythmic backbone was always a long shot. Still, if Birotte lets the case through, it would mark one of the most consequential expansions of music copyright in decades. That’d be a remix worthy of the Super Bowl stage.

Thanks, Eriq. I’ll be back on Thursday evening.

Matt