Dua Lipa wins Levitating copyright infringement case

A judge has dismissed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Dua Lipa over her 2020 single Levitating.

The New Rules singer was sued by the reggae band Artikal Sound System last year over alleged similarities between their 2017 tune Live Your Life and Levitating.

According to Billboard, U.S. District Judge Sunshine S. Sykes ruled on Monday that there was no evidence to suggest that any of the Levitating team had had access to the little-known reggae song.

Artikal Sound System claimed their tune was so readily available and frequently performed that the Levitating writers must have heard it, but Judge Sykes ruled that this argument was “too generic or too insubstantial” to sustain their claim.

“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.

The band also offered a complex theory about how one of Lipa’s co-writers could have possibly heard their track.

Addressing the theory, the judge wrote, “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.”

Judge Sykes dismissed the case, however, she gave Artikal Sound System until 16 June to rectify the errors she had identified and re-file the complaint.

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Written by Mr. Nimbus