A US federal judge has dismissed the core copyright claim underpinning a lawsuit that accused Bad Bunny, Drake and more than 150 other artists of illegally copying the "dembow" rhythm central to reggaeton. Judge André Birotte Jr. ruled on 1 September that the plaintiffs had failed to show that the specific combination of musical elements they sought to protect actually existed within any single copyrighted work they own, reversing his own earlier decision that had left the question for a jury to decide. The ruling is a significant win for the reggaeton industry, as the case had threatened liability across nearly 2,000 tracks.

The lawsuit was filed in 2021 by Cleveland "Clevie" Browne and the heirs of Wycliffe "Steely" Johnson, who claimed their 1989 track "Fish Market" was the origin of the percussion pattern used throughout the genre, including in hits such as "Despacito" and "Tití Me Preguntó". Birotte had initially found the dispute too finely balanced for a judge to resolve, but after Bad Bunny's label Rimas Entertainment and other defendants, including Drake's OVO Sound and UMG Recordings, pushed back, he concluded the plaintiffs could not "reconstruct" a protected work by combining fragments from several different recordings. He said such an approach would effectively let the plaintiffs invent the copyrighted work through the litigation itself, and ruled that defining the scope of a claimed work is a matter for a judge rather than a jury.