{"id":6817,"date":"2025-07-10T02:44:58","date_gmt":"2025-07-10T02:44:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/karol-g-and-tiesto-beat-dont-be-shy-copyright-lawsuit\/"},"modified":"2025-07-10T02:44:58","modified_gmt":"2025-07-10T02:44:58","slug":"karol-g-and-tiesto-beat-dont-be-shy-copyright-lawsuit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/karol-g-and-tiesto-beat-dont-be-shy-copyright-lawsuit\/","title":{"rendered":"Karol G and Ti\u00ebsto Beat ‘Don’t Be Shy’ Copyright Lawsuit"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tA<\/span> federal judge in Miami has thrown out a lawsuit that accused Karol G and Ti\u00ebsto of infringing a Cuban-American composer\u2019s work for their 2021 dance-pop hit \u201cDon\u2019t Be Shy.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Wednesday (July 9) ruling from Judge Cecilia M. Altonaga granted summary judgment to Karol G (Carolina Giraldo-Navarro) and Ti\u00ebsto (Tijs Michiel Verwest) while also tossing claims against Atlantic Records, Kobalt, Sony Music Publishing and Warner Records.<\/p>\n

\n\tRene Lorente-Garcia sued in 2023, alleging \u201cDon\u2019t be Shy,\u201d which was Karol G\u2019s first English-language release and peaked at No. 4 on Billboard<\/em>\u2019s Hot Dance\/Electronic Songs chart, copied the melody, rhythm and harmony of his 1998 song \u201cAlgo Diferente.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe defendants all denied any infringement and said they\u2019d never even heard of Lorente-Garcia or \u201cAlgo Diferente\u201d before the lawsuit. Their expert witness, copyright litigation heavy hitter Dr. Lawrence Ferrara<\/strong>, said the 1998 song is markedly different from \u201cDon\u2019t be Shy\u201d and that the two tracks share only common building blocks.<\/p>\n

\n\tLorente-Garcia\u2019s lawyers countered this with their own expert report from Richie Viera<\/strong>, 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.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cWhile his CV highlights substantial experience in the business side of the Latin music industry,\u201d writes the judge of Viera, \u201cnone of these roles involves the core competencies of forensic musicology: transcribing compositions, analyzing protectable expression or applying comparative methodologies to determine similarities.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tJudge Altonaga says Viera\u2019s 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, \u201cI 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\u2026 I hold an instinct, something that was granted to me by God.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThat is not a methodology,\u201d writes Judge Altonaga. \u201cIt is, at best, Viera\u2019s personal intuition offered up as professional expertise.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tWith Viera\u2019s expert report excluded, Lorente-Garcia\u2019s attorneys would have needed to show that the writers of \u201cDon\u2019t be Shy\u201d had access to \u201cAlgo Diferente\u201d in order to defeat the summary judgment motion.<\/p>\n

\n\tLorente-Garcia\u2019s case comes up short on this front, too, according to Judge Altonaga, who says the evidence \u201creveals little more than \u2018Algo Diferente\u2019s\u2019 presence in the digital ether, one among millions of songs\u201d and that \u201cno reasonable jury\u201d could find that Ti\u00ebsto and Karol G heard the track.<\/p>\n

\n\tPryor Cashman attorney Donald Zakarin<\/strong>, who represents Ti\u00ebsto and Karol G as well as the label and publisher defendants, tells Billboard<\/em>, \u201cThis was a misguided case that never should have been brought.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cThere was no possibility of access and, as Dr. Ferrara demonstrated, the claimed \u2018similarities\u2019 were commonplace musical building blocks found in multiple pre-existing works,\u201d Zakarin continues. \u201cIt 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.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tLorente-Garcia\u2019s lawyers and Viera did not immediately return requests for comment.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A federal judge in Miami has thrown out a lawsuit that accused Karol G and Ti\u00ebsto of infringing a Cuban-American composer\u2019s work for their 2021 dance-pop hit \u201cDon\u2019t […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":6818,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[3335,429,729,5107,303,6308,6430],"class_list":["post-6817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-beat","tag-copyright","tag-dont","tag-karol","tag-lawsuit","tag-shy","tag-tiesto"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6817"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6817\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/6818"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}