Dua Lipa wins temporary dismissal of 'Levitating' copyright case

Dua Lipa has temporarily won a dismissal of the copyright case for her 2020 track ‘Levitating’, with the judge giving Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System a chance to refile the case.

Originally filed in March last year, the lawsuit alleged that Dua Lipa’s hit track – which broke a record for being the longest-charting song by a female artist on the Billboard Hot 100 chart (77 weeks) – took its core hook from Artikal Sound System’s 2017 track ‘Live Your Life’.

In the latest ruling on the case, however, U.S. District Judge Sunshine S. Sykes said there was no evidence to support the view required for a copyright case, that the pop star had “access” to the earlier song.

In their initial filing, the reggae band suggested one theory as to how she would have done, pointing out that one of Lipa’s co-writers used to work with a woman who was allegedly taught guitar by the brother-in-law of one of their band members.

But the judge deemed this to be too convoluted, writing: “These attenuated links, which bear little connection to either of the two musical compositions at issue here, also do not suggest a reasonable likelihood that defendants actually encountered plaintiffs’ song.”

Artikal Sound System also claimed their track was widely available, citing the fact they’d sold “several hundred” physical CDs, played it at concerts and it was available on streaming platforms – all things the judge said was “too generic or too insubstantial”.

“Plaintiffs’ failure to specify how frequently they performed “Live Your Life” publicly during the specified period,” Judge Sykes added, “where these performances took place, and the size of the venues and/or audiences precludes the Court from finding that Plaintiffs’ live performances of the song plausibly contributed to its saturation of markets in which Defendants would have encountered it.”

Lipa’s case comes amid a number of recent high-profile copyright infringement cases, the most notable of which has been Ed Sheeran’s ‘Shape Of You’, which the hitmaker won not once, but twice, against arguments it plagiarised from Marvin Gaye’s classic soul track ‘Let’s Get It On’.