It’s almost become a pattern in recent years: if a song becomes a hit, copyright infringement lawsuits follow, and Dua Lipa was trashed by two of them in four days last week. According to multiple media reports, her worldwide hit “Levitating”, which spent 68 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100, sparked two lawsuits from songwriters alleging the song violated their compositions.
The first was filed on March 1 by Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System claiming that Lipa’s song was taken from their relatively obscure 2017 track “Live Your Life”. This complaint contains few specific details other than stating that the two tracks are so similar that it is “highly unlikely that ‘Levitating’ was created independently”.
In a second, more detailed lawsuit filed March 4 in New York, songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer accused Lipa of copying their 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and the 1980 song “Don Diablo”, two songs. disco era tracks. The pair claim that the opening melody of “Levitating” was a “duplicate” of the melody of their songs; there is some similarity in the rhythmic presentation of the initial phrases in the verses before the melodies diverge. Lawyers for Brown and Linzer argue that the tune snippet in question was instrumental in the song’s success on TikTok and its associated chart success.
“The signature tune is the most streamed and recognizable part of infringing works and plays a critical role in their popularity,” they wrote. “Because video creators often cut off already-short snippets of audio on TikTok, the signature tune often makes up fifty percent or more of these viral videos.”
In their complaint, attorneys for Brown and Linzer pointed to press interviews in which they allege that Lipa “admitted that she deliberately emulated previous eras” and “drawn inspiration” for the “retro” sound.
“In search of nostalgic inspiration, the defendants copied the creation of the plaintiffs without attribution,” they wrote. The complaint also includes defendants from Warner Music Group, guest rapper DaBaby (whom Lipa pulled out of the remix due to the rapper’s homophobic comments last year) and others involved in the song.
In an unusual statement for the lawsuit, lawyers for Brown and Linzer resorted to puns to state their position: “Defendants have blown the intellectual property of plaintiffs into the air,” they wrote. “Plaintiffs sue so that defendants cannot evade willful infringement.”
Representatives from Lipa, Warner Music, and several writers and publishers associated with the song either declined or did not immediately respond to Variety’s requests for comment, puns or not.
Listen to the tracks in question below:
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