A former girlfriend of Bad Bunny has cleared a major legal hurdle in her fight over a voice recording the reggaeton star used on one of his songs, with Puerto Rico's Supreme Court ruling that her case can move forward.
The dispute centers on a short audio clip of Carliz De La Cruz Hernández saying "Bad Bunny baby," which appears on "Dos Mil 16," a track from Bad Bunny's blockbuster 2022 album "Un Verano Sin Ti." De La Cruz Hernández claims the recording was used without her consent.
In an 80-page ruling, the island's high court found she has enough grounds to pursue a claim that the use of her voice violated her right to control the commercial exploitation of her own identity. Bad Bunny, whose legal name is Benito Martinez Ocasio, has been contesting the lawsuit since De La Cruz Hernández first filed it in 2023.
According to her court filings, De La Cruz Hernández began a relationship with Bad Bunny in 2011 and recorded the phrase at his request four years later, in 2015. The two went on to break up and get back together more than once, splitting for good but continuing to communicate on and off until 2019, per her account of the relationship's timeline.
De La Cruz Hernández says she never gave permission for the recording to be used on either "Pa Ti," a song released in 2015, or later on "Dos Mil 16." She alleges that Bad Bunny and his label, Rimas Entertainment, spread the clip across streaming platforms, social media, television, radio, and promotional material, effectively transforming her voice into a marketing device that stoked public fascination with their relationship and helped drive sales.
Her suit claims the defendants profited commercially from her voice without ever compensating her for it, and the Supreme Court determined that she had laid out enough factual basis to support a plausible claim of commercial exploitation.
The ruling wasn't a total win, however. While De La Cruz Hernández can continue pursuing damages tied to "Dos Mil 16," the court found that she waited too long to bring a claim over "Pa Ti," ruling that the statute of limitations on that earlier song had already expired by the time she filed suit.
In a separate but related part of the decision, the court's majority also reinstated a copyright claim that had previously been thrown out. The justices concluded that De La Cruz Hernández has standing to argue that her recorded voice, given its personal and distinctive qualities, could potentially qualify for copyright protection as a performance in its own right, a notable legal question that will now get to be argued further as the case continues.
Not every judge on the panel agreed with that outcome. One dissenting judge indicated he would have dismissed both the commercial exploitation and copyright claims entirely, arguing that neither was legally sound.
With the copyright claim revived and the commercial exploitation claim tied to "Dos Mil 16" allowed to move forward, the case is now positioned to continue working its way through Puerto Rico's court system, likely setting up further legal arguments over how far personal identity and voice rights extend when a private recording ends up embedded in a hit song.
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