A rapper popular on TikTok must pay Sony Music more than $800,000 in damages for using a copyrighted sample without permission, a federal judge ruled on Wednesday (March 27), saying the hefty fine will cost him a six-figure ” lesson” about “carefully choosing the materials that go into his raps.”
Sony sued Trefuego (real name Dantreal Daevon Clark-Rainbolt) in 2021, accusing him of using an “egregious” sample from a 1986 Japanese music song on his “90mh” – a track that Sony claimed had 155,000 views TikTok video and streamed 100 million times on Spotify.
After struggling to track him down, a federal judge ruled last year that the 20-year-old rapper had, in fact, infringed Sony's copyright. And in a subsequent ruling Wednesday, the same judge ordered him to hand over a whopping $802,997 — covering about $700,000 in profits from Spotify and other platforms, and about $100,000 he would pay Sony in licensing fees.
“The court hopes this case will serve as a $802,997.23 lesson to the defendant in carefully selecting the materials included in his raps,” said U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman he wrote in his decision.
The judge also ordered Trefuego to pay ongoing royalties, including a 50% cut of publishing revenue and a 20% cut of recording revenue, and to repay $2,230 in legal fees to Sony.
“Sony pursued a reasonable, non-frivolous allegation to justify infringement of its copyrighted work,” Judge Pittman wrote. “Some may question the wisdom of asserting a claim against a relatively small fish like Trefuego, but that fact does not render Sony's motive improper or their lawsuit unreasonable.”
Sony has been pursuing Trefuego in some form since January 2021, when the company informed him that it believed “90mh” was built on an illegal sample of “Reflections,” a 1986 song by Japanese composer Toshifumi Hinata. After filing takedown requests in August 2022 to pull the song, Sony finally launched its lawsuit in December.
In its complaint, the company pointed out that Hinata's song had a recent surge in popularity after an appearance in the 2020 Netflix film Tigertail and placement in popular background music playlists on Spotify.
“Trefuego has brazenly attempted to ride Hinata's creativity and popularity without regard to United States copyright laws or the rights of plaintiffs,” the company's lawyers wrote at the time. “He used and copied the plaintiffs' work without asking or paying a single cent to the plaintiffs and continued to exploit that music despite the plaintiffs' demand that he stop.”
Sony's lawsuit took a strange detour last year when Judge Pittman ruled that the company could forego traditional methods of communicating with Trefuego and instead simply send him direct messages on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Soundcloud. In doing so, the judge ruled that Sony had made “extensive efforts” and “made great efforts” to find Trefuego in real life, including “seven separate attempts” to serve him and hired a private investigator.
In a particularly notable effort, Sony representatives apparently went “to his mother's house on Mother's Day in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her” but still came up empty: “Unfortunately, mother was not there either claimed to him that I did not know who he was,” the judge wrote.
With those procedural issues settled, Judge Pittman ruled on the case in November — and sided decisively with Sony. Although the judge noted that the case pitted “one of the largest international entertainment conglomerates on the planet” against “a twenty-year-old kid,” he ruled that a David-and-Goliath attitude would not shield Trefuego from liability.
“To quote '90mh,' this case involves a young man who was 'too focused on making dough' to understand the broader implications of purchasing a creative work without proof of originality or a license,” the judge wrote in November of. decision. “To quote '90mh' again, Trefuego probably imagined that Sony wouldn't want 'real smoke' enough to pursue this claim. But they did.”
Neither Trefuego nor a Sony Music representative responded to requests for comment.
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