RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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A federal judge says Bad Bunny doesn’t deserve to be reimbursed nearly $500,000 he spent defeating a copyright lawsuit over an allegedly uncleared sample on Un Verano Sin Ti , ruling that such a penalty “would send the wrong message.”
Bunny (Benito Martínez Ocasio) demanded Empawa Africa repay his hefty legal bill after it dropped a case he said “should never have been brought.” His lawyers said the sample was obviously cleared and that Empawa just wanted “an undeserved, multimillion-dollar settlement.”
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But in a ruling Thursday (Aug. 20), a federal judge rejected those arguments, ruling that Empawa had filed an “objectively reasonable” lawsuit that might have succeeded if he had continued to litigate it — and that there was no evidence of any “ulterior motive.”
“Defendants offer little besides conjecture to support their allegation that Empawa brought this action with ill-motive,” Judge Otis D. Wright II wrote in a decision obtained and first reported by Billboard .
Filed last year, the case claimed Bunny’s “Enséñame a Bailar” off Un Verano Sin Ti included an uncleared sample of a 2019 track called “Empty My Pocket” by a Nigerian artist named Dera (Ezeani Godfrey). The lawsuit was a big deal because Bunny’s album was a big deal — spending 13 weeks atop the Billboard 200 and more than 150 weeks total on the chart.
The star quickly argued he had done nothing wrong, saying he had properly cleared the sample with production company Lakizo Entertainment, another rightsholder on “Empty My Pocket.” Faced with that defense, Empawa effectively abandoned the case this spring.
But the superstar wasn’t ready to walk away that easily. His lawyers demanded that Empawa reimburse the whopping $465,612 in attorney’s fees he and other defendants had racked up fighting the case, calling the lawsuit “meritless from the beginning” and aimed at generating “bad publicity” to win a payout.
Unlike most types of U.S. lawsuits, such “fee shifting” is available to people who win copyright cases. Judges can award reimbursement when they feel an infringement lawsuit was particularly groundless, or filed with an improper motive.
But in Thursday’s decision, Judge Wright said Empawa’s lawsuit against Bunny was hardly such a case. The star did actually use the sample of “Empty My Pocket,” the judge pointed out, and his lawyers had then refused to provide Empawa with any proof he had secured a license to do so: “The court cannot fault Empawa for declining to trust defendants counsels’ word.”
Beyond simply denying the request, Judge Wright went further — saying that punishing Empawa for filing such an infringement case would be “strongly antithetical” to the very purpose of copyright law.
“Here, where Empawa advances seemingly meritorious claims, where Defendants admit that they sampled the copyrighted material, and where no conclusive evidence has emerged demonstrating that defendants had permission to use the sample, the imposition of attorneys’ fees would send the wrong message to parties seeking to protect their intellectual property by testing meritorious claims in open court,” the judge wrote.
An attorney for Bad Bunny did not immediately return a request for comment. In a statement to Billboard , Empawa’s attorney Ed McPherson said he was “extremely pleased” with the judge’s decision: “The judge found that imposing fees in this case would send the wrong message to copyright owners seeking to protect their intellectual property. We agree.”
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