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27 May 2015Copyright

Shakira copyright ruling thrown into doubt

A US judge who previously ruled that a song by pop star Shakira infringed copyright belonging to a Dominican Republic-based songwriter has reportedly cited fresh evidence that could throw the ruling into doubt.

Judge Alvin Hellerstein said new evidence presented by the defendants’ in the case, Sony and Mayimba Music, have caused him to lose trust in the case.

Hellerstein said that a cassette tape, which allegedly proved that songwriter Ramon Arias Vasquez wrote the song before Shakira’s infringing track “Loca” was released (in 2010), may have been fabricated.

According to Reuters, Hellerstein has ordered Sony and Mayimba Music to appear at a seven-day hearing in August.

The hearing could take place either at the US District Court for the Southern District of New York, where the original trial took place, or in Puerto Rico (an unincorporated US territory), should witnesses fail to obtain a visa to travel to the US from the Dominican Republic.

The dispute centres on the song “Loca con su Tiguere”, composed by Vasquez in the late 1990s.

In August last year, Hellerstein ruled that Shakira’s 2010 song “Loca” contained segments that “were clearly copied from” Vasquez’s track, which was said to have been released in the late 1990s.

In his ruling Hellerstein found that Vasquez’s song was recorded onto a cassette tape in 1998. A copy of the song on the tape was registered at the US Copyright Office in 2011.

But, since the judgment last year Sony has reportedly submitted evidence that the tape was a fabrication and was in fact made in 2011, a year after Shakira’s song was released.

Shakira’s track, a collaboration with rapper Eduard Edwin Bello Pou, better known as “El Cata”, was widely released as a single around the world and reached the top of the US’s Latin Music Billboard charts.

Cata had released his own version of the track before collaborating with Shakira.

Issuing his judgment, Hellerstein said that there was “no dispute” that Shakira’s version of the song was based on Cata’s.

“Since Bello had copied Arias [Vasquez], whoever wrote Shakira’s version of the song also indirectly copied Arias,” he concluded.

Mayimba declined to comment.

Sony had not responded to a request for comment at the time of publication.

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