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What Were The Three Lawsuits Put Against Dua Lipa For Song Plagiarism
Right from March 2022 to August 2024, multiple artists have come up with copyright infringement lawsuits, demanding compensation against Dua Lipa's alleged unlawful usage of their music and artistry.
Dua Lipa’s 2020 hit single, Levitating remains one of her best but most contested songs. The song which crawled at No.1 on Billboard’s Hot 100 Songs of 2021 and holds the record for the longest-charting song in the women’s Hot 100 history, has three lawsuits filed against it.
Right from March 2022 to August 2024, multiple artists have come up with copyright infringement lawsuits, demanding compensation against Dua Lipa's alleged unlawful usage of their music and artistry.
August 2023: Bosko Kante files multimillion-dollar lawsuit
Music producer, Bosko Kante filed a copyright claim demanding over $20 million from the singer in Los Angeles. He alleged that Dua Lipa and Warner Music Group used his talk box recording in multiple remixes of Levitating, which was reportedly not part of the deal. In his August 2023 lawsuit, the Grammy-winning artist has cited the agreement made between him and the song’s creators and is battling for compensation for the remixes including a remix by DJ The Blessed Madonna, another remix featuring rapper DaBaby and Lipa’s performance at the American Music Awards.
“All three remixes sampled and incorporated a greater amount of plaintiff’s work than that used in the original version. Defendants did not seek or receive any authorization or permission to use the composition or sound recording of plaintiff’s work from plaintiff,” Kante’s lawyers claimed in the lawsuit, per Billboard.
Moreover, the lawyers conveyed that Kante, whose former collaborations were with Kanye West and Big Boi, was interested in resolving the matter without litigation but the lack of cooperation and “unwillingness” by the Defendants urged him to legally pursue this case of “blatant infringement of Plaintiff’s copyrights.” This is the third lawsuit filed against Dua Lipa’s Levitating.
March 2022: Songwriters L Russel Brown and Sandy Linzer file lawsuit
In the second lawsuit against the chart-topping single, songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer wrote in a complaint that Lipa had lifted the opening music of Levitating from two of their songs. They claimed that Levitating’s “signature melody” was a “duplicate” of their 1979 song Wiggle and Giggle All Night and 1980 song Don Diablo.
“Defendants have levitated away plaintiffs’ intellectual property. Plaintiffs bring suit so that defendants cannot wiggle out of their wilful infringement,” the songwriters’ lawyers stated, per a Billboard report.
Brown and Linzer also cited interviews with the pop star reportedly admitting that “she deliberately emulated prior eras” and the “retro” music for her 2020 album, Future Nostalgia was inspired from historic music.
March 2022: Florida reggae band sues Dua Lipa for plagiarism
The first lawsuit came with Florida-based band Artikal Sound System, who sued Lipa for alleged plagiarism, per Billboard. This occurred only a week before the songwriters Brown and Linzer contested similar claims against the singer. The band claimed that she copied their 2017 song Live Your Life for the central hook of the song and that it was “highly unlikely that Levitating was created independently”.
The complaint was filed in federal court in LA, alleging that Lipa had “access” to their song despite it not being available on Spotify. Live Your Life is available on SoundCloud boasting 34k plays.
However, the court ruled there was no evidence of Lipa having access to the band’s music, and the latter were forced to drop their case.
ALSO READ: Dua Lipa's Third Studio Album Radical Optimism Is Here: Genre And Streaming Details Explored
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