Bad Bunny may have won a recent copyright lawsuit, but the Puerto Rican superstar is still stuck paying nearly half a million dollars in legal fees after a federal judge rejected his request for reimbursement.
Legal Cost Battle
On Aug. 20, U.S. District Judge Otis D. Wright II denied Bad Bunny’s request for $465,612 in attorney’s fees in a case involving his 2022 album, “Un Verano Sin Ti.” The lawsuit centered on his song “Enséñame a Bailar,” which Empawa Africa Music Services Limited claimed sampled Nigerian artist Dera’s 2019 song “Empty My Pocket” without permission.
Empawa filed the lawsuit in May 2025 but Bad Bunny’s legal team maintained that the sample had been properly cleared through Lakizo Entertainment, one of the copyright holders.
Empawa later dropped the case, effectively ending the litigation in Bad Bunny’s favor. His attorneys then went ahead and sought reimbursement for the $465,612 in legal costs, calling the lawsuit “meritless from the beginning” and accusing Empawa of pursuing an “undeserved, multi-million-dollar settlement.”
Judge Wright, however, determined that the lawsuit was “objectively reasonable” and found no evidence that Empawa had brought the case with an improper motive.
The judge also pointed to an important issue in the dispute: Bad Bunny’s legal team acknowledged that the song contained the copyrighted sample, while, according to the ruling, no conclusive evidence had emerged showing that the sample had been properly authorized before the lawsuit was filed.
Wright said awarding legal fees against Empawa would be “strongly antithetical” to the purpose of allowing copyright holders to pursue legitimate claims in court.
“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,” the judge wrote.
The ruling leaves Bad Bunny responsible for his own legal bill.
