Can a rhythm be owned? What a reggaeton lawsuit reveals about how copyright misunderstands music

A little-known American lawsuit could end up reshaping popular music. A US federal court is preparing to rule on a landmark copyright dispute. At its centre is an interesting question: can a short rhythmic pattern – one that appears in thousands of reggaeton tracks – be owned?

The case, known as the Fish Market dispute, asks whether a looping beat widely associated with reggaeton can be protected by copyright. More than 150 artists and producers have been named as defendants, and around 3,600 songs are implicated.

But the consequences stretch far beyond potential damages. If the claim succeeds, a rhythm that underpins an entire genre could become private property. The lawsuit exposes a long-standing weakness in copyright law, which is its inability to clearly define what makes a piece of music “original”.

Copyright is meant to be straightforward. Original musical works receive legal protection but copies do not. In practice though, music rarely fits this neat, binary logic.

Songs are built from shared elements like rhythms, chord progressions and harmonic patterns. Musicians can reuse, adapt and transform them. These building blocks are how music communicates. But copyright law offers little guidance on which musical elements can be protected, and which belong to everyone.

Unlike literature or visual art, music lacks clear legal definitions for its basic components. There is no settled guidance on whether courts should compare melody, rhythm, harmony, tempo, timbre or pitch, or indeed how much similarity is too much. As a result, judges and juries are left to decide these questions case by case, often without musical expertise.

That uncertainty has made music copyright litigation expensive and unpredictable. Jury trials are particularly risky, and damages can be eye-watering. Two recent American cases show just how inconsistent the system has become.

When courts can’t agree what counts as copying

In 2018, a US jury found that musicians Robin Thicke and Pharrell Williams had infringed Marvin Gaye’s work with their song Blurred Lines, not because of a shared melody or lyrics, but because of a similar “feel” or “vibe”. The decision marked a dramatic expansion of copyright protection, suggesting that a musical mood could be owned. Critics warned this risked allowing artists to monopolise styles rather than specific creative expressions.

By contrast, a 2024 US court ruling in a case involving singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran took the opposite view. The court held that copyright does not protect the basic building blocks of music. Shared rhythms, chord sequences or stylistic elements, it ruled, are part of musical language itself. Protection applies only to concrete expressions such as specific melodies or lyrics.

The Fish Market case magnifies this contradiction and raises the stakes considerably.

The plaintiffs – Steely & Clevie Productions, which represent the musical catalogue of the influential Jamaican dancehall duo Wycliffe “Steely” Johnson and Cleveland Browne – claim that their 1989 instrumental track, Fish Market, introduced the so-called “dem bow” rhythm. This is a distinctive beat, they argue, which forms the backbone of reggaeton. They are seeking copyright protection for that rhythmic pattern.

If successful, the ruling would grant two rightsholders control over a core musical feature used across a global genre. Unsurprisingly, many musicians and scholars see this as an attempt to claim ownership of reggaeton itself.

They argue that the rhythm predates Fish Market, drawing on long-established Afro-Caribbean and Afro-Cuban traditions such as the habanera beat. Reggaeton, they say, emerged through cultural exchange: from Jamaican dancehall, through Puerto Rico and out into the world. According to this perspective, the plaintiffs are not protecting originality but attempting to privatise a shared cultural inheritance.

Why rhythm is so hard to copyright

Rhythm sits at the heart of the legal problem. It is abstract yet fundamental, short in duration but repeated across a song and deeply tied to cultural identity. Copyright law, designed to compare fixed and discrete works, struggles to evaluate such elements. When courts attempt to isolate rhythm from its musical and cultural context, they risk mistaking convention for originality.

Copyright once played a limited role in musical life. Over time, as recorded music became a major commercial industry, songs increasingly came to be treated as economic assets. Ownership and control moved to the foreground, often at the expense of recognising music as an intellectual and cultural practice rooted in borrowing, influence and exchange.

The dispute around the “dem bow” rhythm lays bare the clash between subjective creativity, economic regulation and the law’s demand for objective rules. That clash is becoming harder to ignore as AI-generated music floods the market, trained on existing works and capable of producing endless stylistic variations. If copyright cannot clearly define originality now, its limits will soon be tested even further.

The reggaeton rhythm on trial is not just a fight over a beat. It reveals a fundamental mismatch between copyright law’s rigid standards and the reality of how music is made.

The Fish Market case offers judges an opportunity to clarify where protection should end, and to recognise the dangers of stretching originality so far that creativity itself becomes collateral damage.

Anna Monnereau does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.