Amílcar Boscán, the songwriter who wrote Willie Colón‘s Talento de Televisión, has sued the late salsa musician’s publishing company over royalties he says he was never paid.
In a complaint filed in the US District Court for the Southern District of New York on Monday (July 20), which you can read in full here, Boscán also asked a judge to let him reclaim the copyrights to the song under US copyright law.
He is seeking at least USD $300,000 in damages, plus a declaration that his rights will revert to him no later than January 1, 2031.
The suit names ElMalo, Inc., which does business as Willie Colón Music Company, and centers on two compositions Boscán conveyed to the publisher under a songwriter agreement dated December 1, 1994: Talento de Televisión and Caer en Gracia.
Under that agreement, according to the complaint, the company was to pay Boscán half of the royalties collected on the songs and to send him accounting statements twice a year.
The company “never paid” him “the vast majority of the royalties owed” and never sent the required statements, Boscán alleges.
He says he put the company on written notice of those failures repeatedly between July 2024 and March 2026.
According to the complaint, Talento de Televisión had been streamed more than 430 million times on Spotify as of May 3, 2026, making it Colón‘s most-streamed recording on the platform. As of writing, the track has been streamed more than 451 million times.
The complaint says his next most-popular Spotify recording sat below 280 million streams, with hundreds of millions of additional plays for the song across YouTube and Apple Music.
The complaint describes Boscán as the song’s sole author.
It also alleges that the company registered the song with BMI, “falsely representing” Colón as its composer and omitting Boscán, which it casts as the distribution of “false copyright management information” under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.
Boscán served a notice of termination on July 3, 2024, seeking to end the 1994 grant and recover his rights as of January 1, 2031 under Section 203 of the US Copyright Act.
For transfers made from 1978 onward, that provision lets an author take back a copyright they assigned to a publisher 35 years later, within a set five-year window.
The complaint says the company has disputed the validity of that notice on multiple occasions since 2024.
Boscán‘s claims include breach of contract and a violation of the DMCA, alongside alternative claims for rescission, unjust enrichment and conversion, and a request that the court declare the termination valid.
Beyond damages, he is asking the court to order an accounting of the money the company has collected and to correct the song’s authorship credit.
Boscán‘s suit is the latest in a run of disputes over termination rights, the provision that lets creators reclaim works they signed away decades earlier.
In January, the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled that songwriter Cyril Vetter could reclaim worldwide control of a 1963 song from his publisher, a decision that major music companies, together with BMG, have asked the US Supreme Court to overturn.
Salt-N-Pepa are pursuing a parallel fight in the same New York court, where a judge dismissed their bid to reclaim their master recordings in January and the duo has appealed.
In a similar case, Argentine-Venezuelan singer Ricardo Montaner sued Universal Music Group in June, alleging he was never paid royalties on his earliest albums and moving to terminate a decades-old deal.
Colón, who died on February 21, 2026, controlled the publishing company until his death, according to the complaint, so the suit now proceeds against the company, ElMalo, Inc.Music Business Worldwide
