Dua Lipa wins plagiarism lawsuit against ‘Levitating’

Posted On March 28, 2025March 28, 2025

Dua Lipa’s hit single ‘Levitating’, which is the Billboard Hot 100’s longest-charting song by a female musician, has faced two lawsuits since it was released in 2020. The singer has just won the most recent, proving that she did not copy the song ‘Wiggle and Giggle All Night’ by Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer.

Lipa was first accused of borrowing from the song ‘Live Your Life’ by Artikal Sound System, but the case was dismissed in 2023.

The second case, which US District Judge Katherine Polk Failla has now dismissed, saw Brown and Linzer accuse Lipa and the song’s other writers of ripping off ‘Wiggle and Giggle All Night’ from 1979, and certain aspects of their other track, ‘Don Diablo,’ from 1980.

Lipa and her legal team claim they’d never heard these songs before they wrote ‘Levitating’ back in 2018. The judge didn’t see enough substantial evidence to take the case to trial.

Judge Failla declared (via Rolling Stone), “The Court finds that a musical style, defined by Plaintiffs as ‘pop with a disco feel,’ and a musical function, defined by Plaintiffs to include ‘entertainment and dancing,’ cannot possibly be protectable — alone or in tandem — because … [that would] completely foreclose the further development of music in that genre or for that purpose.” 

Meanwhile, Brown and Linzer’s attorney, Jason Brown, believe that there are grounds to appeal this decision, explaining, “Under recent case law — including the [Ed] Sheeran decision — courts have become increasingly focused on what can be dissected and filtered out on paper, rather than what is felt through the music itself.”

He continued, “There’s a growing disconnect between how these cases are decided — by academically analyzing briefs, bar lines, and musical notation — versus how audiences actually experience music. The soul of a song doesn’t live in a court brief. It lives in the sound, the feel, and the performance — and that’s what juries should be allowed to hear and judge.”

‘Levitating’ appeared on Lipa’s second album, Future Nostalgia. The English singer is set to headline two shows at Wembley Stadium this summer, in addition to Liverpool’s Anfield.

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