Relying on Personal Intuition Is Not a Valid Methodology for an Entertainment Industry Expert

Posted on August 14, 2025 by Expert Witness Profiler

This copyright infringement action concerns two musical works: Plaintiff, Rene Lorente Garcia’s 1998 song Algo Diferente (“AD”), and the 2021 track Don’t Be Shy (“DBS”), performed by Tijs Michiel Verwest (“Tiësto”) and Carolina Giraldo-Navarro (“Karol G”). 

Plaintiff brought two claims: direct infringement against Karol G and Tiësto (“Count I”); and contributory and vicarious infringement against Atlantic Recording Corporation (“Atlantic”), Kobalt Music Publishing America, Inc. (“Kobalt”), Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC (“Sony”), and Warner Records Inc. (“Warner”). 

Plaintiff, a professional flutist and Latin music composer, has featured AD on several albums and made it available on digital platforms like Spotify and YouTube. DBS was created collaboratively over Zoom on May 29, 2020, by writers located in the Netherlands and Finland; Tiësto and others later completed the production, and Karol G added her vocals in the final stages.

Each side offered a purported music expert to address whether DBS copies protectable elements of AD. Plaintiff relied on Richie Viera, a Latin music producer and former Vice President of Artists and Repertoire (“A&R”) at Capitol Records, who contended that the two songs share original melodic, harmonic, and rhythmic features. 

Defendants requested that the Court exclude the Viera Report under Rule 702 and Daubert.

Entertainment Industry Expert Witness

Richard A. Viera-Cintrón is a former Vice President of A&R at Capitol Records, with decades of experience managing and producing Latin artists. Beyond that, he has taught music business and copyright at the Liceo de Arte y Tecnología in Puerto Rico, led seminars across Latin America, and appeared as a television commentator on music industry issues in Puerto Rico. 

Viera is also a voting member of the Latin Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences and the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences.

His expertise encompasses copyright infringement, moral rights, authorial rights, and trademark registration, making him a highly sought-after expert witness in legal disputes within the entertainment sector. As a musicologist, historian, and producer, he has worked with major labels and artists, curating historical compilations and reediting classic vinyl and CD recordings. 

Want to know more about the challenges Richie Viera has faced? Get the full details with our Challenge Study report.

Discussion by the Court

Qualifications

While Plaintiff touts Viera’s decades in the music industry, the Court held that experience alone does not open the gate to expert testimony.

To begin with, the list of cases that appears in Viera’s CV is long, but not illuminating. He cited 22 matters where he allegedly served as an expert, consultant, or musicologist — but nearly all involve the same cluster of parties in the Puerto Rico music industry, with one Plaintiff, Joel Bosh, recurring across five suits filed within three years. 

Plaintiff highlighted Viera’s role as an author and educator, pointing to three published books and a forthcoming volume titled Stolen Music – The Fraud of Prior Art and Musical Building Blocks. But Plaintiff supplied no academic reviews, peer validation, or usage data to show these works carry weight in the forensic or legal musicology community.

More generally, the nature of Viera’s professional background does not qualify him to engage in the comparative analysis his report purports to offer. While his curriculum vitae (“CV”) highlights substantial experience in the business side of the Latin music industry — including artist management, record production, television commentary, and music business education — none of these roles involves the core competencies of forensic musicology: transcribing compositions, analyzing protectable expression, or applying comparative methodologies to determine similarities.

Moreover, Viera did not hold a degree in musicology, music theory, composition, or any closely related field. Nor did Viera’s deposition testimony bridge the gap. He declined to define standard musicological terms, such as “tonic” and “diatonic” despite using them in his analysis.

Reliability

Even if Viera’s experience qualified him to testify, that experience would not render his opinions reliable.

Defendants explained in detail why Viera’s methodology failed every aspect of Daubert‘s reliability framework. His analysis — which relied largely on listening rather than transcription or notation — is neither testable nor replicable, lacks peer review or validation, and departs from accepted musicological methods by failing to conduct a prior art review or isolate protectable elements. 

That concern is heightened by Viera’s admission that he did not prepare the transcriptions in his own report; Plaintiff supplied them — leaving the foundation of Viera’s analysis not just unverifiable, but secondhand.

Plaintiff asserted that Viera’s “aural comparisons” supported by “visual representations” are grounded in industry experience and accessible to a jury. Yet Plaintiff identified no recognized methodology underlying this framework, nor did he explain how Viera’s conclusions can be tested or reviewed.

Asked at his deposition about how he determines originality without evaluating prior art, he replied: “I use my instinct.I am able to detect when a word is copied, when there is any sort of copy.”

He added, “I have a unique perception, something that perhaps very few people in the music industry have.” The Court held that it is not a methodology; it is, at best, Viera’s personal intuition offered up as professional expertise — untestable, unverifiable, and precisely the sort of expert say-so that Daubert excludes.

Helpfulness

The Viera Report did not engage in the type of analysis a jury could not undertake on its own. To the contrary, the Court held that Viera’s assertions rely on intuition and unexplained impressions — the kind of subjective judgments a jury is just as equipped to make as Viera; particularly in the absence of self-generated transcriptions, any review of prior art, or analytical tools to distinguish protectable expression from unprotectable elements

Because Viera’s testimony is not the kind that Rule 702 envisions — evidence that informs, rather than supplants, the jury’s judgment — it is properly excluded.

Held

The Court granted the Defendants’ motion to exclude the Plaintiff’s proposed expert, Richie Viera.

Key Takeaway:

The unremarkable observation that an expert may be qualified by experience does not mean that experience, standing alone, is a sufficient foundation rendering reliable any conceivable opinion the expert may express.

An expert who is relying solely or primarily on experience must explain how that experience leads to the conclusion reached, why that experience is a sufficient basis for the opinion, and how that experience is reliably applied to the facts.

Case Details:

Case Caption:Lorente-Garcia V. Giraldo-Navarro
Docket Number:1:24cv23066
Court Name:United States District Court, Washington Western
Order Date:July 09, 2025