Pryor Cashman achieved a significant victory on behalf of approximately 110 music industry clients in Cleveland Constantine Browne et al. v. Rodney Sebastian Clark et al., one of the largest and most closely watched copyright cases with implications affecting thousands of works in the Latin, dancehall, and reggaeton genres, among others.

On September 1, 2026, U.S. District Judge André Birotte Jr. granted a motion for reconsideration and reversed his July decision, in which he had denied Pryor Cashman’s motion for summary judgment, and dismissed plaintiffs’ compositional copyright infringement claim, holding that plaintiffs failed to identify a single work containing the supposed selection and arrangement Plaintiffs claimed to own.

The lawsuit was brought by Cleveland "Clevie" Browne, Steely & Clevie Productions Ltd., and representatives of the late Wycliffe "Steely" Johnson against more than 160 artists and music companies. The plaintiffs alleged that nearly 2,000 songs (and a similar number of sound recordings) infringed copyrights in musical elements derived from the plaintiffs’ songs Fish Market, Dem Bow, and an interest they claimed in the Pounder (Dub Mix II) recording.

The motion for reconsideration noted that Pryor Cashman's summary judgment motion had directly challenged Plaintiffs' claimed selection and arrangement, noting that even Cleveland Browne had admitted at his deposition that the elements claimed to be in the selection and arrangement did not exist in any of their works.  And the Judge himself had raised that issue at argument of the summary judgment motion.  But in initially denying Pryor Cashman’s summary judgment motion, the Court overlooked this issue.  

On reconsideration, however, the Judge agreed that the plaintiffs failed to identify a single copyrighted work containing the specific selection and arrangement they sought to protect and could not create a new copyrighted work during litigation by combining elements from multiple recordings.

As a result, the Court dismissed the plaintiffs’ composition-based copyright claim, dramatically narrowing the scope of the case. The only remaining claims concern the question of whether any of the defendants’ works directly sampled portions of the plaintiffs’ sound recordings, a significantly narrower issue than the dismissed composition claim.

The ruling represents a major victory for Pryor Cashman and its clients and is expected to have significant implications for future music copyright disputes involving rhythm-based and selection-and-arrangement claims.

The Pryor Cashman team was led by Partners Donald S. Zakarin, Frank P. Scibilia, James Sammataro, and Benjamin S. Akley, with assistance from Associates Shamar Toms-Anthony, Rebecca Mandel, and Reel Mustafa.

This result further underscores Pryor Cashman's leadership in high-stakes music litigation and its longstanding success representing artists, record labels, publishers, and other entertainment industry clients in precedent-setting copyright disputes.

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