Dua Lipa's song, Levitating, hit with yet another lawsuit

Dua Lipa’s hit song “Levitating” has got her in more trouble as she’s hit with yet another lawsuit after the last one got cleared recently. A multimillion-dollar copyright claim was filed in Los Angeles by musician Bosko Kante who claims Dua Lipa and Warner Music Group unlawfully used a recording made with his talk box in remixes of the single. This is the third time that “Levitating” has been hit by a lawsuit.

The suit cites a spoken agreement between Bosko Kante and the creators of the song that his talk box recording could only be used in the original recording, but not subsequent remixes. Now, he is seeking more than $20 million for alleged copyright infringement on several remixes including one with The Blessed Madonna, the smash remix featuring rapper DaBaby and a performance by Dua Lipa at the American Music Awards.

Billboard reportedly said that Kante has tried raising the issue with Dua Lipa and Warner Music Group but there’s been no response from them. Reportedly, he has “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”.

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

For the unversed, a talk box is something which allows musicians to modify the sound of an instrument and apply speech sounds. He has contributed talk box performances to Kanye West and Big Boi.

Prior to this, in 2022, a Florida-based reggae band Artikal Sound System claimed Dua Lipa stole the “Levitating”’ core hook from their 2017 song “Live Your Life”. The band dropped their case in June 2023 after a judge ruled there was no evidence that the creators of “Levitating” had “access” to the earlier track.

There was another in 2022 in which songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer claimed that the melody of “Levitating” was lifted from their lesser-known 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and 1980 track “Don Diablo”. Dua’s lawyers had then argued that she had never heard either track before creating “Levitating”.

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