A federal judge has serious doubts about a copyright lawsuit claiming British-Albanian singer Dua Lipa stole her smash hit song “Levitating” from a Florida reggae group track.
The band Artikal Sound System sued the pop star last year, claiming her 2020 song borrowed its core hook from their 2017 tune “Live Your Life.”
But in a ruling on Monday, U.S. District Judge Sunshine S. Sykes said there was no sign that anyone involved in creating “Levitating” had access to the earlier song – a key requirement in any copyright lawsuit.
Artikal Sound System offered a complex theory: one of Lipa’s co-writer had previously worked with a woman who was allegedly taught guitar by the brother-in-law of one band member.
“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,” the judge wrote.
The band also claimed that their track was so widely-available that the “Levitating” writers must have heard it.
They cited the fact that it had been played at concerts and had sold “several hundred” physical CDs and was available on some streaming platforms.
However, Judge Sykes said those arguments were “too generic or too insubstantial” to sustain a lawsuit.
“Plaintiffs’ failure to specify how frequently they performed “Live Your Life” publicly during the specified period, 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,” the judge wrote.
In technical terms, Monday’s ruling dismissed the lawsuit against Lipa. But the case isn’t over yet as the judge ruled that Artikal Sound System could try to fix the mistakes she had identified and refiled a so-called amended complaint.
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