Bad Bunny won’t have his nearly $500,000 in legal fees in a copyright lawsuit he won reimbursed because a judge believed it would “send the wrong message.”
The Puerto Rican artist filed a request to have his sizable legal fees reimbursed by Empawa Africa, which accused him of using an uncleared sample on his 2022 album, Un Verano Sin Ti, in a lawsuit filed last year. In the filing, the company alleged that the 2019 track “Empty My Pocket” by the Nigerian artist Dera was used without permission on Bunny’s song “Enséñame a Bailar.”
Bad Bunny’s legal team argued that the sale was cleared by the production company Lakizo Entertainment, one of the copyright holders of “Empty My Pockets.” The legal case was later abandoned by Empawa Africa, effectively giving Bad Bunny a de facto win. As a result, his legal team requested a reimbursement of $465,612 in attorney’s fees for the “meritless from the beginning” lawsuit that they alleged generated “bad publicity.”
They argued that Empawa was seeking “an undeserved, multimillion-dollar settlement” with the lawsuit, but federal judge Otis D. Wright II decided that the case was “objectively reasonable” and there’s no evidence of an “ulterior motive.” Since Bad Bunny’s legal team admitted that they used the sample, the judge argued that it would be “strongly antithetical” and “would send the wrong message” if Empawa Africa was punished for the lawsuit.
“Defendants offer little besides conjecture to support their allegation that Empawa brought this action with ill motive,” Wright II wrote in the ruling. “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.”
