A federal judge in Miami has thrown out a lawsuit that accused Karol G and Tiësto of infringing a Cuban-American composer’s work for their 2021 dance-pop hit “Don’t Be Shy.”
A Wednesday (July 9) ruling from Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga granted summary judgment to Karol G (Carolina Giraldo-Navarro) and Tiësto (Tijs Michiel Verwest) while also tossing claims against Atlantic Records, Kobalt, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Records.
Rene Lorente-Garcia sued in 2023, alleging “Don’t be Shy,” which was Karol G’s first English-language release and peaked at No. 4 on Billboard’s Hot Dance/Electronic Songs chart, copied the melody, rhythm and harmony of his 1998 song “Algo Diferente.”
The defendants all denied any infringement and said they’d never even heard of Lorente-Garcia or “Algo Diferente” before the lawsuit. Their expert witness, copyright litigation heavy hitter Dr. Lawrence Ferrara, said the 1998 song is markedly different from “Don’t be Shy” and that the two tracks share only common building blocks.
Lorente-Garcia’s lawyers countered this with their own expert report from Richie Viera, a Latin music producer and former A&R executive at Capitol Records. But Judge Altonaga says Viera is not qualified to serve as a musicology expert.
“While his CV highlights substantial experience in the business side of the Latin music industry,” writes the judge of Viera, “none of these roles involves the core competencies of forensic musicology: transcribing compositions, analyzing protectable expression or applying comparative methodologies to determine similarities.”
Judge Altonaga says Viera’s expert report lacks any real musicological analysis and fails to even consider the key element of prior art. When asked to describe his methodology at a deposition, Viera supposedly replied, “I use my ears. I am able to detect when a word is copied, when there is any sort of copy. I operate at that high level… I hold an instinct, something that was granted to me by God.”
“That is not a methodology,” writes Judge Altonaga. “It is, at best, Viera’s personal intuition offered up as professional expertise.”
With Viera’s expert report excluded, Lorente-Garcia’s attorneys would have needed to show that the writers of “Don’t be Shy” had access to “Algo Diferente” in order to defeat the summary judgment motion.
Lorente-Garcia’s case comes up short on this front, too, according to Judge Altonaga, who says the evidence “reveals little more than ‘Algo Diferente’s’ presence in the digital ether, one among millions of songs” and that “no reasonable jury” could find that Tiësto and Karol G heard the track.
Pryor Cashman attorney Donald Zakarin, who represents Tiësto and Karol G as well as the label and publisher defendants, tells Billboard, “This was a misguided case that never should have been brought.”
“There was no possibility of access and, as Dr. Ferrara demonstrated, the claimed ‘similarities’ were commonplace musical building blocks found in multiple pre-existing works,” Zakarin continues. “It is just wrong that successful songwriters and artists are so frequently subjected to objectively baseless claims that are expensive to fight. But fighting these claims is the right thing to do, and we are grateful to our clients and their representatives for standing up to protect all songwriters.”
Lorente-Garcia’s lawyers and Viera did not immediately return requests for comment.
