Levitating

Dua Lipa and Warner Music Group are facing another copyright lawsuit over “Levitating,” this time from a music producer who says he never granted the star permission to use his “talk box” recording in remixed versions of the smash hit song.

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In a lawsuit filed Monday (July 31) in federal court, Bosko Kante says he created a so-called talk box track for use in Lipa’s original version of the song, but that the creators of “Levitating” had no right to use it in subsequent remixes, like the even-more-popular version featuring DaBaby.

“Plaintiff made numerous attempts to resolve this matter short of litigation, but such efforts were unsuccessful, due to Defendants’ unwillingness to cooperate or accept responsibility for this blatant infringement of Plaintiff’s copyrights,” Kante’s lawyers wrote.

Kante calls himself one of the world’s top artists on the talk box — a decades-old device that allows musicians to apply speech sounds onto the sounds of an instrument. After contributing talk box performances for Kanye West and Big Boi, Kante launched a company called ElectroSpit in 2014 to sell a proprietary digital version of the device.

In this week’s lawsuit, Kante says that he was approached in 2014 by Stephen Kozmeniuk, one of producers of “Levitating,” about creating a talk box performance that would be incorporated into Lipa’s song. He says he later did so, and eventually reached an oral agreement that the track could be used in “Levitating.”

But Kante says that the deal expressly didn’t cover any further remixes beyond the original release — meaning Lipa and Warner Music didn’t have the right to use it on the DaBaby remix, nor on another version by The Blessed Madonna featuring Madonna and Missy Elliott.

“All three remixes sampled and incorporated a greater amount of plaintiff’s work than that used in the original version,” Kante’s lawyers wrote. “Defendants did not seek or receive any authorization or permission to use the composition or sound recording of plaintiff’s work from plaintiff.”

A rep for Dua Lipa did not immediately return a request for comment on Tuesday.

The new case is the third copyright lawsuit filed against Lipa over “Levitating,” which spent 77 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100 chart after debuting in 2020.

In March 2022, a Florida reggae band called Artikal Sound System claimed Lipa stole the song’s core hook from their lesser-known 2017 tune “Live Your Life.” Days later, songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer accused Lipa of borrowing the melody to her track from their 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and their 1980 song “Don Diablo.”

But in June, Artikal Sound System dropped their case just days after a federal judge ruled that there was no sign that anyone involved in creating “Levitating” had had “access” to the earlier song — a key requirement in any copyright lawsuit.

The case filed by Brown and Linzer is still alive but is facing a similar pending argument from Lipa’s lawyers, who say the pop star “never heard” the two songs she allegedly copied.

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.