"Lipa admitted that she deliberately emulated prior eras of music to create Future Nostalgia, the aptly named album on which 'Levitating' appears," the complaint read. "In seeking nostalgic inspiration, Defendants copied Plaintiffs' creation without attribution." The plaintiffs were requesting an unspecified amount of damages. Lipa also faced a copyright infringement suit from the Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System, claiming that "Levitating" ripped off their 2017 song "Live Your Life." She won the dismissal of that suit in June 2023. The "New Rules" hitmaker was also hit with a third lawsuit over "Levitating" in July 2023 from music producer Bosko Kante who claimed the pop star was never given permission to use his "talk box" recording in her remixes of "Levitating," per Billboard.
Pop star Dua Lipa won a copyright lawsuit filed against her by songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, who claimed her hit single Levitating infringed songs of theirs from 1979 and 1980. Judge Katherine Pok Failla ruled that only "generic similarities" were shared between the tracks and that the descending singsong melody under scrutiny had already been used by Mozart and Gilbert and Sullivan—and found earlier at the disco thanks to the Bee Gees' 1977 hit Stayin' Alive.
On Thursday, US district judge Katherine Polk Failla, sitting in Manhattan, New York, ruled that similarities between Ms Lipa’s and the plaintiffs’ songs were generic and involved musical elements that could not be protected. She noted that such melodic components have been ‘used for centuries’, citing works by Mozart and the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive as examples. Judge Failla referenced a 2023 case in which singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, 34, was accused of copying elements of Marvin Gaye’s 1973 track Let’s Get It On in his 2014 hit Thinking Out Loud. The judge in that case also found that the two songs shared only ‘fundamental musical building blocks’. It is the second time Ms Lipa has successfully defended Levitating, which spent six weeks in the top ten after its release. In 2023 a lawsuit filed by Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System was dismissed after a judge found no evidence that Ms Lipa and her co-writers had access to the group’s 2015 track Live Your Life, which they alleged was copied.
