Dua Lipa will have to go to court for a third time over her hit song Levitating.
A judge in New York ruled that the British pop star must face a lawsuit accusing her of copying her 2021 megahit from a 1979 disco song.
US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla said songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer could try to prove “substantial similarity” between Levitating and their song Wiggle and Giggle All Night.
The lawsuit, filed in March last year, claimed that Levitating shared “compositional elements” with Wiggle, most significantly by duplicating its opening melody.
Lipa’s lawyers argued that it was implausible to believe that the 27-year-old had heard Wiggle before writing Levitating.
Judge Failla agreed, but said the plaintiffs alleged “just enough facts” to argue that the songs were so “strikingly similar,” including by sharing a “repetitive rhythm” and “signature melody,” that Lipa must have copied theirs.
“The court cannot foreclose the possibility of plaintiffs meeting the undoubtedly high bar of proving striking similarity,” Failla wrote.
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In a statement, Jason Brown, a lawyer for Brown and Linzer, said they “have great respect for the artists of today but if their material is used there must be proper attribution and compensation.
“We look forward to conducting discovery and taking this case to trial.”
Failla’s opinion does not cover the plaintiffs’ claim that Levitating copied another song, Don Diablo, to which they also owned a copyright.
Levitating, from Lipa’s album Future Nostalgia, spent 77 weeks on Billboard’s Hot 100 US singles chart, and was the number one song on Billboard’s 2021 year-end chart.
The song peaked at number 5 in the UK Charts.
In June, a federal judge in Los Angeles dismissed a lawsuit accusing Lipa of copying Levitating from a 2017 song by the Florida reggae group Artikal Sound System.
Another lawsuit filed in Los Angeles on 31 July claimed that Lipa never got permission from the musician Bosko Kante to include his “talk box” recording in remixes of Levitating.
Lawyers for Lipa and Warner Records have not yet commented.
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