The Supreme Court of Puerto Rico has reversed the dismissal of key claims in a $40 million lawsuit against global music star Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio, known as Bad Bunny, ruling that his ex-girlfriend presented enough facts to proceed with allegations that he used her voice commercially without consent, attribution, or compensation.
The court's 50-page opinion sends the case back to a San Juan court for an evidentiary phase that could reshape how the music industry handles vocal contributions, and how much artists owe the people whose voices help build their brands.
At the center of the dispute is a short vocal tag, the phrase "Bad Bunny, baby", recorded by Carliz De La Cruz Hernández in 2015, allegedly at Bad Bunny's request, while the two were in a relationship. De La Cruz Hernández claims the tag was later used across songs, albums, and promotional material long after their breakup, without her permission or any payment. Newsweek reported that Bad Bunny's team reportedly offered $2,000 to retroactively secure rights to the recording. De La Cruz Hernández rejected the offer.
Two thousand dollars, for a vocal signature woven into the catalog of one of the most-streamed artists on the planet.
The ruling was not a blanket victory for De La Cruz Hernández. The court affirmed the dismissal of her moral-rights claims, concluding that the phrase "Bad Bunny, baby" does not qualify as a protectable creative work under Puerto Rico's Moral Rights statute. The court also upheld the dismissal of claims against Bad Bunny's manager, Noah Assad Byrne, finding insufficient grounds to hold him personally responsible. And claims tied to a 2016 track called "Pa Ti" were deemed time-barred.
But the court allowed the lawsuit to proceed on two significant fronts: Puerto Rico's Right to Own Image law and general damages provisions. The justices found that De La Cruz Hernández's vocal performance, her actual voice on the recording, may still be relevant to those remaining claims, even if the words themselves don't meet the moral-rights threshold.
A 25-page dissent argued that every claim should have been thrown out. The dissenting justice described the vocal tag as a brief, secondary element within the songs and part of protected artistic expression. The dissent also rejected the privacy and image-rights claims, saying the lawsuit failed to show harm to dignity or reputation.
The case now returns to San Juan, where the court will examine authorship, consent, commercial use, and damages.
The gap between the reported $2,000 offer and the $40 million at stake tells you most of what you need to know about the power imbalance at the heart of this case. Whether De La Cruz Hernández ultimately prevails on the merits is an open question. But the Puerto Rico Supreme Court's decision to let her claims survive dismissal signals that courts are willing to take voice-rights disputes seriously, even when the contribution in question is a few seconds long.
Entertainment attorney Heidy Vaquerano, a partner at Fox Rothschild LLP, told Newsweek that artists who use vocal tags have a clear path to avoid this kind of litigation:
"In these cases, if an artist approaches the vocal tag author prior to release, they could negotiate an exclusive buyout of the vocal tag and pay a one-time flat fee for the use. This is preferred as it cuts down on accounting issues and diminishes the copyright interest of co-writers of the song."
Vaquerano also noted that there are no statutory rates for this type of license. The implication is straightforward: without a deal in place before release, the artist loses leverage and faces costly litigation. As Vaquerano put it, the alternative is being "subject to costly litigation costs and fees."
In other words, the industry has a mechanism for handling this cleanly. The question in this case is whether Bad Bunny's team used it.
Ruth Zive, chief marketing officer of Voices, a global voice-solutions platform, framed the case as a turning point for how the industry treats vocal identity. She told Newsweek:
"A person's voice is much more than a sound, it's their identity. When you use a person's voice recording commercially without any clear consent and compensation, you cross a line the industry is only beginning to deal with."
Zive went further, connecting the case to emerging regulatory questions around voice provenance, a growing concern as artificial intelligence makes it easier than ever to replicate, repurpose, and monetize a person's voice without their knowledge.
"For voice‑over artists specifically, this case reinforces what we've always believed: consent is the foundation of all voice solutions. And how this gets resolved will matter even more as voice provenance becomes a critical sticking point amid upcoming regulation."
That framing matters. If a court in Puerto Rico rules that a recognizable vocal performance carries enforceable rights even absent a formal copyright claim, the ripple effects could reach well beyond Latin music. Session singers, ad voice-over artists, and anyone whose recorded voice ends up in commercial use without a clear written agreement will be watching this case closely.
Bad Bunny is not a marginal figure. He was the most-streamed artist of 2025, with over 19.8 billion streams, and headlined the Super Bowl LX halftime show earlier this year. That performance itself became a flashpoint. Bad Bunny ended his set with "God Bless America" while listing countries across the Western Hemisphere, a display that Breitbart reported President Trump described as "an affront to the Greatness of America." Bad Bunny also waved a Puerto Rican flag featuring a light blue triangle associated with Puerto Rican independence.
None of that cultural controversy is directly at issue in the voice-rights lawsuit. But it underscores the scale of the commercial empire built, in part, on a vocal tag that De La Cruz Hernández says she was never paid for. The "Bad Bunny, baby" tag is not some obscure studio artifact. It appeared on major releases, including the album Un Verano Sin Ti, and became a recognizable sonic signature for the artist's brand.
Newsweek noted it reached out to Bad Bunny's team via email for comment. No response was reported.
The San Juan court will now hold evidentiary proceedings to resolve the core factual disputes: Who created the recording? Was consent given for commercial use? How extensively was the tag deployed? And what, if anything, is owed?
The $40 million figure looms large, though it remains unclear whether that number represents the amount sought in the original complaint, an estimated damages calculation, or something else. The specific Rimas entities named as defendants, the companies associated with Bad Bunny, will also have to mount their defense.
For De La Cruz Hernández, the ruling is a procedural win, not a final judgment. She still has to prove her claims. But the Puerto Rico Supreme Court has told her she has enough to get in the door, and that her voice, however brief its appearance on any given track, is not something the legal system will ignore.
The principle here is older than the music industry: if you use what belongs to someone else to make money, you ought to pay for it. Courts exist to sort out whether that happened. Now this one will.
