Lawyers for Sony Music Entertainment have spent months trying to find a TikTok rapper who the label is suing for copyright infringement, even going to his mom’s house on Mother’s Day “in hopes that he would be there to celebrate with her.” Now, a judge now says they can just slide into his DMs.
In an order issued Wednesday, Judge Mark T. Pittman ruled that Sony had exhausted all reasonable routes to locate Trefuego — the artist behind a popular TikTok song called “90mh,” which Sony claims features a “flagrant” unlicensed sample from an earlier song.
Faced with that situation, the judge said Sony’s lawyers could instead reach out to his Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and Soundcloud accounts, which have remained active since Sony filed its lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs have shown that serving process via these social media platforms will be reasonably effective in giving Trefuego notice of this suit,” Judge Pittman wrote.
Sony has been pursuing Trefuego in some form since January 2021, when the company notified him that his “90mh” — a track that’s been featured in 155,000 videos on TikTok and streamed 100 million times on Spotify — was built on an illegal sample from Japanese composer Toshifumi Hinata. After filing takedown requests in August 2022 to get the song pulled, Sony finally launched a lawsuit in December.
Wednesday’s ruling highlights the extraordinary lengths that litigants like Sony must sometimes go to “serve” filings on opponents — a key procedural requirement in any lawsuit.
The same problem recently confronted lawyers repping Kanye West, who desperately wanted to drop the embattled rapper as a client but couldn’t find him to do so. And NBA legend Shaquille O’Neal spent months avoiding a lawsuit over his endorsement of failed cryptocurrency exchange FTX — only to finally be located and served at a Heat-Celtics game last month.
In his decision on Sony’s case, Judge Pittman said the company’s lawyers had made “extensive efforts” and “gone to great lengths” to find Trefuego. They made “seven separate attempts” to serve him with the lawsuit, the judge said, including hiring a private investigator and scouring his social media pages.
In one particularly notable effort, Sony’s reps 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.
A typical alternative to in-person service would be to print a notice of the lawsuit in the local papers — the same thing that Kanye’s estranged lawyers wanted to do in his case. But in Wednesday’s decision, Judge Pittman said that “modern problems require modern solutions.”
“This court has concerns as to whether SoundCloud and TikTok rapper extraordinaire Trefuego is a regular reader of the Fort Worth Star Telegram or that he regularly visits the information tab of Fort Worth’s city website,” the judge wrote.
Judge Pittman ruled that Sony could instead use “certain social media accounts” that “most certainly belong to the young bard.” Trefuego’s Instagram, Twitter, TikTok and SoundCloud pages all “appear to be substantially active,” the judge said, and indicate that he is a “frequent user” of those platforms.
Ahead of the decision, Sony had offered one other digital alternative: to email the rapper’s manager, with whom Sony had correspondence over the unlicensed sample before it resorted to litigation. But the judge rejected that route, noting that “all lines of communication have ceased” with the manager since the filing of the case.
“Given his own mother’s willingness to deny her relationship to him, it is not unlikely that his manager would also willingly delete emails or continue to ignore them,” the judge wrote. “Because communications through this line have proven futile already, the Court will not grant service through this already explored dead-end avenue.”
