TikTok Rapper Must Pay Sony Music More Than $800K Over Unlicensed Sample, Judge Rules

A rapper popular on TikTok must pay Sony Music more than $800,000 in damages for using a copyrighted sample without permission, a federal judge ruled Wednesday (March 27), saying that the big fine would teach him a six-figure “lesson” about “carefully selecting the materials included in his raps.”

Sony sued Trefuego (real name Dantreal Daevon Clark-Rainbolt) in 2021, accusing him of using a “blatant” sample from a 1986 Japanese instrumental song in his “90mh” — a track that Sony claimed had been featured in 155,000 TikTok videos and streamed 100 million times on Spotify.

After struggling to locate him, a federal judge ruled last year that the 20-year-old rapper had, in fact, infringed Sony’s copyrights. And in a follow-up ruling Wednesday, that same judge ordered him to hand over a whopping $802,997 — covering roughly $700,000 he earned in profits from Spotify and other platforms, and approximately $100,000 he would pay Sony in licensing fees.

“The court hopes this case will serve as a $802,997.23 lesson for defendant in carefully selecting the materials included in his raps,” U.S. District Judge Mark T. Pittman wrote in his decision.

The judge also ordered Trefuego to pay ongoing royalties, including a 50% cut of publishing revenue and a 20% cut of recording revenue, and to repay $2,230 in legal costs incurred by Sony.

“Sony pursued a reasonable, non-frivolous claim to vindicate infringement of its copyrighted work,” Judge Pittman wrote. “Some may query the wisdom of pursuing a claim against a relatively small fish like Trefuego, but that fact does not render Sony’s motivation improper or their lawsuit unreasonable.”

Sony has been chasing Trefuego in some form since January 2021, when the company notified him that it believed “90mh” was built on an illegal sample of “Reflections,” a 1986 song by Japanese composer Toshifumi Hinata. After filing takedown requests in August 2022 to get the song pulled, Sony finally launched its lawsuit that December.

In its complaint, the label pointed out that Hinata’s song had seen a recent surge of popularity after an appearance in Netflix’s 2020 film Tigertail and placement on popular ambient music playlists on Spotify.

“Trefuego brazenly sought to ride the coattails of Hinata’s creativity and popularity without regard to the United States copyright laws or the rights of plaintiffs,” the label’s attorneys wrote at the time. “He used and copied plaintiffs’ work without so much as asking, or paying a cent to plaintiffs, and he continued to exploit that music despite plaintiffs’ demand that he stop.”

Sony’s lawsuit took a bizarre detour last year when Judge Pittman ruled that the label could forgo traditional methods of contacting Trefuego and instead simply send him direct messages on Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Soundcloud. In doing so, the judge ruled that Sony had made “extensive efforts” and “gone to great lengths” to find Trefuego in real life, including “seven separate attempts” to serve him and hiring a private investigator.

In one particularly notable effort, Sony’s representatives apparently went “to his mother’s house on Mother’s Day in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her” but still came up empty: “Sadly, he was not there, and his own mother claimed she did not know who he was,” the judge wrote.

With those procedural issues settled, Judge Pittman ruled on the case in November — and sided decisively with Sony. Though the judge noted that the case pitted “one of the largest international entertainment conglomerates on the planet” against “a twenty-year-old kid,” he ruled that the David-and-Goliath posture would not protect Trefuego from liability.

“To quote ’90mh’, this case involves a young man who was ‘too focused on getting dough’ to understand the broader implications of purchasing a creative work without proof of originality or license-to-use,” the judge wrote in his November decision. “To quote ‘90mh’ again, Trefuego likely imagined Sony wouldn’t ‘really want smoke’ enough to prosecute this claim. But they did.”

Neither Trefuego nor a spokeswoman for Sony Music responded to requests for comment.