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.
