A ruling by a Manhattan judge found that Shakira's hit song "Loca" infringed on the work of a Dominican songwriter.
According to the New York Post, the Columbian pop star's Spanish-language single topped the Latin Billboard chart in 2010 and sold 5 million copies worldwide. Judge Alvin Hellerstein ruled Tuesday that it ripped off a song written roughly two decades ago by Ramon Arias Vasquez, "Loca con su Tiguere." Conversely, he ruled that the English language version did not infringe.
Mayimba Music, the rights holders of Arias' work, did not sue the artist herself, but rather her song's distributors, Sony Corp of America.
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Reuters reported that both versions of the song "revolve around a love triangle in which the singers are poor and the opposing suitors are rich, a theme expressed in Arias's title. Shakira's version uses the word 'tigre' (tiger) instead of 'tiguere,' which is Dominican slang, but Hellerstein said the meaning was the same."
Complicating things somewhat, Shakira's song features Dominican rapper Eduard Edwin Bello Pou, aka "El Cata," who originally released a hip hop single called "Loca con su Tiguere" in 2007. That single was also distributed by Sony, and was used at the basis for Shakira's "Loca."
"There is no dispute that Shakira's version of the song was based on Bello's version," the judge wrote in the ruling. "Accordingly, I find that, since Bello had copied Arias, whoever wrote Shakira's version of the song also indirectly copied Arias."
Arias has long accused he wrote the song in the 1990's and that after he showed it to Bello he stole it and claimed it as his own. Bello denies this version of the story, and said he wrote it himself.
Future hearings will determine any damages incurred by Mayimba Music.
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