Dua Lipa is facing a second song theft lawsuit over her 2020 hit ‘Levitating’ which, it’s alleged, rips off not one but two songs. Well, three if you also count the allegations made in the first of the lawsuits filed over ‘Levitating’ last week.
The legal cliche, of course, is that “where there’s a hit there’s a writ”. Though some lawyers sometimes also say “once one lawsuit beckons, be sure there’ll be a second”. Yeah that doesn’t really work does it? That’s probably why no lawyer has actually ever said that. Though, it’s not unknown for hits to be accused of ripping off more than one song. Or sometimes the allegation is that a new song is ripping off an old song that ripped off an even older song.
Anyway, in the new lawsuit Dua Lipa is accused of ripping off two songs written by songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linze: 1979’s ‘Wiggle And Giggle All Night’ and 1980’s ‘Don Diablo’.
As a result, the new lawsuit says, according to Billboard: “Defendants have levitated away plaintiffs’ intellectual property – plaintiffs bring suit so that defendants cannot wiggle out of their wilful infringement”. See what they did there? Yeah, that alone is grounds for dismissing this new lawsuit, surely?
Brown and Linze were beaten to the litigation starting line by Florida-based band Artikal Sound System who last week claimed that ‘Levitating’ rips off their 2017 track ‘Live Your Life’.
They were just trying to live their life when Lipa levitated away with their melody, their lawsuit didn’t say. So that litigation can’t be dismissed on the solid grounds that cheekily referencing track titles when making legal arguments in song-theft lawsuits shouldn’t be allowed.
In the new litigation, Brown and Linze also claim that Lipa’s song thievery is all the more annoying because the bit of her song that rips off their songs – the “signature melody” – is key to the snippet of the record that went viral on TikTok. “Because video creators frequently truncate the already brief snippets of sound on TikTok”, it states, “the signature melody often comprises 50% or more of these viral videos”.
Dua Lipa is yet to respond to any of this.
Bill Donahue