Dua Lipa‘s legal team has filed to dismiss Artikal Sound System‘s lawsuit that accuses her of stealing their copyright.
The Florida reggae band claimed Dua ripped off their 2017 track “Live Your Life” to make her smash-hit single “Levitating.” They also sued Dua’s label, Warner Records, and claimed that those working with Dua heard the song and duplicated its hook. They’re reportedly asking for profits from “Levitating” and damages.
Billboard reports Dua’s represented by the law firm Mitchell Silberberg & Knupp LLC, which filed a motion to dismiss the suit on Monday and claimed neither Dua nor her team had access to the lesser-known single.
“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,’” the motion read.
The statement continued, “Plaintiffs are essentially seeking to plead access by alleging that someone who knows someone who knows someone might have met one of the ‘Levitating’ writers.” The motion went on to say Artikal’s suit is comprised of “vague, boilerplate labels and conclusions” and “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,’” the petition continued. “Instead, Plaintiffs merely conclusorily allege purported similarities between the two works without any factual detail whatsoever.”
Dua released “Levitating” in October 2020. It went on to spend 68 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100.
This isn’t the only “Levitating” suit Dua faces. She was also sued by songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, who alleged she stole their 1979 single “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and their 1980 track “Don Diablo.” That case is still pending.
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