It’s been a good couple of weeks for famous songwriters fighting off lawsuits accusing them of copyright infringement. First Mariah Carey beat a long-running suit accusing her of ripping off elements of her enduring smash All I Want For Christmas Is You.
Now, news breaks that Dua Lipa has been victorious in another landmark case, this time pertaining to her megahit, Levitating.
A federal judge in New York has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against the Warner Records-signed act, ruling that Levitating, released in 2020, did not illegally copy a 1979 disco song.
In an opinion and order issued Thursday (March 27), U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla granted summary judgment in favor of Lipa and her co-defendants, finding that the plaintiffs failed to demonstrate substantial similarity between protectable elements of the works.
Those co-defendants included all three major music companies – as Sony Music Publishing (US) LLC; Universal Music Corporation; and Warner Records Inc – plus Lipa’s Levitating co-writers, Clarence Coffee, Jr., Sarah Hudson, and Stephen Kozmeniuk.
The lawsuit, filed by Larball Publishing Company and Sandy Linzer Productions, alleged that Levitating infringed on their copyrights for two songs: Wiggle and Giggle All Night, a 1979 disco song recorded by Cory Daye, and Don Diablo, a 1980 song by Miguel Bosé that the plaintiffs had acquired rights to through a previous infringement settlement.
(MBW has obtained Judge Failla’s order and you can read it in full here.)
Judge Finds No Protectable Similarity
Judge Failla determined that the musical phrase shared by Levitating and the plaintiffs’ works amounted to “five groupings of repeated 16th notes descending on a B minor scale in Levitating but on a D major scale in Don Diablo“.
The court concluded that this descending scale, along with one additional note that plaintiffs argued created a “signature melody”, were not protectable under copyright law.
“The Court ultimately concludes that there can be no substantial similarity (and thus no copyright violation) as a matter of law, because ‘the similarity between [the] works concerns only non-copyrightable elements of the [P]laintiff[s’] work,’” Judge Failla wrote.
Ed Sheeran Precedent Strengthened Lipa’s Case
The ruling heavily relied on the Second Circuit’s recent decision in Structured Asset Sales, LLC v. Sheeran, which appears to have been pivotal for Lipa’s defense.
That precedent-setting case, which Ed Sheeran won in November 2024, established that “basic musical building blocks like notes, rhythms, and chords are generally not copyrightable,” though a “work consisting of unprotectable elements may still be protectable as an original ‘selection and arrangement’ of those elements.”
The Sheeran decision provided a powerful legal framework that directly benefited Lipa’s defense, as Judge Failla explicitly cited it when rejecting the plaintiff’s claims that a descending scale plus one additional note could constitute protectable expression.
Plaintiffs’ Arguments Rejected
The plaintiffs had attempted to argue that additional elements, including the “patter style” of singing, the “pop with a disco feel” musical style, tempo, and other characteristics made the combination protectable.
However, the court rejected this theory, noting it had been introduced too late in the proceedings and, more importantly, that these additional elements “lack sufficient originality alone, or as combined” to be protectable under copyright law.
Judge Failla pointed out that several of the claimed elements were commonplace compositional elements, with evidence showing the “patter style” has been used “for centuries” in operas by Mozart and Rossini and operettas by Gilbert and Sullivan.
“More fundamentally, the Court finds that a musical style, defined by Plaintiffs as ‘pop with a disco feel,’ and a musical function, defined by Plaintiffs to include ‘entertainment and dancing,’ cannot possibly be protectable — alone or in tandem — because to hold otherwise would be to completely foreclose the further development of music in that genre or for that purpose,” the ruling stated.
The court also dismissed the plaintiffs’ derivative claims for declaratory relief and accounting, which they had acknowledged would be rendered moot if the copyright infringement claim failed.
This lawsuit dismissal marks the conclusion of one of several legal challenges Dua Lipa has faced over Levitating.
In 2022, a band called Artikal Sound System alleged that Levitating was “substantially similar” to their track Live Your Life.
That case was dismissed by a federal court judge who ruled that Artikal Sound System failed to provide evidence that Levitating‘s creators had access to their song.
In a separate ongoing case, producer Bosko Kante sued Lipa, WMG and producer Stephen Kozmeniuk in 2023, alleging that a talkbox recording he made was used without permission on three remixes of Levitating.
In September 2024, Judge Hernan D. Vera of the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California denied a motion to dismiss that case, allowing it to proceed.
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