Dua Lipa’s Lawyers Blast ‘Levitating’ Copyright Lawsuit: ‘Devoid of a Shred of Factual Detail’

Attorneys for Dua Lipa are asking a federal judge to quickly toss out a lawsuit claiming she stole her smash hit song “Levitating” from a little-known reggae track, calling the allegations “speculative,” “vague” and supported by little real evidence.

Members of the Florida band Artikal Sound System sued Lipa earlier this year, claiming her 2020 smash hit – which spent 77 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart – borrowed its core hook from their 2017 song “Live Your Life.”

But in a motion to dismiss the case filed Monday (Nov. 14), Lipa’s lawyers said there was no sign that anyone involved in creating “Levitating” ever even had access to the earlier song – a key requirement in any copyright lawsuit. Artikal Sound System’s attempts to show such a connection, they said, were “tortured.”

“They amount to nothing more than a speculative, attenuated theory based on numerous degrees of separation, none of which establish any link — let alone a concrete link — between the writers of ‘Levitating’ and ‘Live Your Life,’” wrote Lipa’s lawyers from the firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLP.

“Plaintiffs are essentially seeking to plead access,” the star’s legal team wrote, “by alleging that someone who knows someone who knows someone might have met one of the ‘Levitating’ writers.”

“Levitating,” released in 2020 on Lipa’s second studio album Future Nostalgia, was a massive hit, eventually peaking at No. 2 on the Hot 100 and securing the honor of being the longest-running top 10 song ever by a female artist on the chart.

Artikal Sound System is a reggae band based out of South Florida, founded in 2012 as a duo before later adding additional musicians and vocalist Logan Rex. The band released “Live Your Life” on its 2017 EP Smoke and Mirrors.

In their March lawsuit, the band said the songs sounded so similar that it was “highly unlikely that ‘Levitating’ was created independently.” The lawsuit also named Warner Records, as well as others who helped create the hit track.

In Monday’s filing, beyond arguing that Lipa and other writers never heard the song, her lawyers also said Artikal Sound System failed to show that the songs were similar enough to constitute copyright infringement. The complaint is full of “vague, boilerplate labels and conclusions,” they said, but “devoid of a shred of factual detail”

“Plaintiffs fail to allege a single fact that identifies what material from ‘Live Your Life’ is copied in ‘Levitating’,” Lipa’s lawyers wrote. “Instead, Plaintiffs merely conclusorily allege purported similarities between the two works without any factual detail whatsoever.”

An attorney for Artikal Sound System did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

The current case is one of two lawsuits Lipa is facing over “Levitating.” The other, filed just days later, claims she and the other writers lifted material from both a 1979 song called “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and a 1980 song called “Don Diablo.” That case is still pending in a different court.

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