Dua Lipa Slammed With Two ‘Levitating’ Copyright Infringement Lawsuits in Four Days
variety.comJem Aswad Senior Music EditorIt’s almost become a model in recent years: If a song’s a hit, the copyright-infringement lawsuits follow, and Dua Lipa was clobbered with two of them in four days last week.
Her global hit “Levitating,” which has spent 68 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, has drawn two lawsuits from songwriters claiming the song infringes on their compositions, according to multiple media reports.The first was filed March 1 by a Florida reggae group called Artikal Sound System, claiming that Lipa’s song lifts from their relatively obscure 2017 track, “Live Your Life.” That complaint includes little specific detail beyond claiming that the two tracks are so similar that it was “highly unlikely that ‘Levitating’ was created independently.” In the second, more-detailed legal complaint, filed on March 4 in New York, songwriters L.
Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer accused Lipa of copying both their 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and 1980 song “Don Diablo,” two tracks dating from the disco era.
The pair claim the opening melody to “Levitating” was a “duplicate” of the melody to their songs; there is some similarity in the rhythmic delivery of the opening phrases in the verses, before the melodies diverge.
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