A federal judge has found that a hit 2010 song by Colombian pop star Shakira copied a Dominican songwriter’s work. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein in a ruling in Manhattan federal court on Tuesday said Shakira’s Spanish-language single “Loca” infringed on the work of Ramon Arias Vasquez, who wrote “Loca con su Tiguere” in the late 1990s. The ruling is a victory for the plaintiff, Mayimba Music, which holds the rights to Arias’s work and which sued Sony Corp of America and several other Sony units in 2012. The judge found only two of them liable, Sony/ATV Latin and Sony/ATV Discos, for distributing Shakira’s song.
