Jury Award Thrown Out In Copyright Infringement Lawsuit

Negron v. Rivera (D.Puerto Rico May 24, 2006)

This case is perhaps more interesting for the district court’s lengthy analysis of the relationships between the plaintiff, defendants, and others within the Puerto Rican music establishment. However, for the sake of considerable brevity, this summary only discusses the Defendants’ renewed motions for judgment as a mater of law, which where brought after the Plaintiff successfully won verdicts before a jury for damages totaling $600,000.

First, the district court agreed with one of the Defendant’s argument that “that [the plaintiff’s] action is barred because he lacks a valid copyright registration since in support of his application for copyright registration he deposited only reconstructions, rather than bona fide copies, of the [allegedly infringed musical works:]”

In the present case, [the plaintiff Torres] wrote the songs Noche de Fiesta and Bebo por Ti in 1993. He recorded the songs on cassette tapes, wrote the lyrics on separate sheets of paper, and gave these items to Ruben Cañuelas. It is undisputed that Torres never saw the original recordings of the songs of lyrics sheets again. At some point in 1994, after the 1993 Centro Records phonorecord Bailando y Gozando con Gozadera had been commercially released in Puerto Rico and played on the radio, Torres wrote a clean copy of the words to Noche de Fiesta from memory. Thereafter, he copied the lyrics to Noche de Fiesta on to clean pieces of paper with the passing of time and possibly entered the lyrics into a computer. In 2002, Torres recorded himself singing Noche de Fiesta and Bebo por Ti into cassette tapes and prepared transcriptions of the lyrics. These cassette tapes and lyric transcriptions were then submitted with his application for copyright registration to the United States Copyright Office. Like the unsuccessful plaintiffs in Coles and Kodadek, Torres did not refer to the original works or a bona fide copy of the works in producing the recordings of the works that he then deposited with his copyright application. Thus, Torres' deposits constitute impermissible reconstructions. As such, no reasonable jury could find that the recordings and lyric sheets submitted with Torres' copyright application were qualifying copies of the musical works.

Alternatively, the district court concluded that it could not uphold the jury’s verdicts because (1) the plaintiff’s song was an “unauthorized derivative work, [of another artist’s song], not entitled to copyright protection;” (2) the plaintiff had granted the defendants an implied license to exploit the songs in dispute; and (3) “the amount of damages awarded by the jury is untenable due to insufficiency of the evidence.”

Holding: Defendants’ motions for judgment as a matter of law were granted. Further, the court entered an amended partial judgment dismissing the plaintiff’s claims as to the musical works “Noche de Fiesta” and “Bebo por Ti”.