Daddy Yankee Sues Ex-Wife, Jay-Z Fight Continues, Taylor Swift Tickets Hacked & More Music Law

This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.

This week: Daddy Yankee sues his ex-wife for $250 million; Jay-Z’s dispute with his former accuser and her lawyer goes on; prosecutors say Taylor Swift tickets were stolen and resold by hackers; and much more.

THE BIG STORY: Daddy Yankee Goes Back To Court

Daddy Yankee’s legal war with ex-wife Mireddys González isn’t over yet.

The pair finalized their divorce last month, but in a lawsuit filed last week in Puerto Rico, the reggaetón superstar (Ramón Luis Ayala Rodríguez) accused her and her sister Ayeicha González Castellanos of mismanaging two of his companies to the tune of hundreds of millions of dollars.

“Mireddys and Ayeicha … proceeded to concentrate in themselves a greater power than authorized and, together, made negligent and selfish decisions that were detrimental to both the companies and [Daddy Yankee] in his personal capacity and as an artist,” the star’s lawyers wrote.

The lawsuit follows, and often echoes, the allegations Yankee made in December when he sought an injunction against González – namely that the two women had withdrawn $100 million from his companies’ bank accounts without authorization. Now, Yankee claims that after regaining control of the companies, his team discovered many new irregularities, including the “disappearance” of key records.

For all the details, go read the full story from Billboard’s Griselda Flores.

Other top stories this week…

FIGHT GOES ON – Jay-Z’s rape accuser is standing by her story, according to court documents filed last week — directly contradicting a recent lawsuit in which the superstar claimed the woman had admitted to fabricating the allegations. Later in the week, the star’s lawyers filed sworn statements from private investigators to whom the accuser allegedly recanted, and suggested that she and her lawyer should sit for depositions.

HACKED TICKETS – Members of a “cybercrime crew” stole more than 900 tickets to the Taylor Swift Eras Tour and other events and then resold them for more $635,000 in illegal profit, according to charges handed down by New York prosecutors. The tour, which wrapped in December with a record-shattering haul of more than $2 billion in face-value ticket sales over a two-year run, spawned an infamously pricy resale market – something the accused fraudsters were allegedly able to exploit.

“FLOWERS” UPDATE – Miley Cyrus seems unlikely to immediately escape a copyright lawsuit filed over allegations that her Grammy-winning “Flowers” infringed the Bruno Mars song “When I Was Your Man.” At a court hearing, a Los Angeles federal judge indicated that would likely deny a motion to dismiss the case filed last year by attorneys for Cyrus.

SHEERAN CASE AT SCOTUS – The legal battle over whether Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud” infringed Marvin Gaye‘s “Let’s Get It On” has reached the U.S. Supreme Court. In a petition for certiorari filed last week, a company that owns a stake in the rights to Gaye’s 1973 song urged the justices to overturn a November ruling by a lower appeals court that rejected the lawsuit, arguing that “the rights of thousands of legacy musical composers and artists” were at stake in the case.

ANTITRUST SHOWDOWN – A lyrics service called LyricFind filed an antitrust lawsuit against Musixmatch, claiming that the larger rival has reached an exclusive licensing deal with Warner Music Group (WMG) that’s “unprecedented in the music industry” and is aimed at securing an illegal monopoly for providing lyrics to streamers like Spotify.