By Roisin O’Connor, The Independent | British pop singer Dua Lipa has won a lawsuit that claimed she copied the melody of her hit song “Levitating” from a Seventies disco track. Songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer sued Lipa in 2022, accusing her of infringing on their copyright for two songs: their 1979 track “Wiggle and Giggle All Night”, recorded by Cory Daye, and the 1980 song “Don Diablo” by Spanish singer Miguel Bosé, which they successfully acquired the rights to through a previous copyright case.
The pair, who co-wrote several hits in the Seventies, accused Lipa, 29, of using their “signature melody” from “Wiggle” six times through “Levitating”, around a third of the total song length.
Lipa’s lawyers denied that she had heard the song before co-writing “Levitating” and said Brown and Linzer could not “monopolise one of the most commonplace and rudimentary elements of music: the use of a minor scale”.
Court documents show that US district judge Katherine Polk Failla determined that the musical phrase shared by “Levitating” and the plaintiffs’ works amounted to “five groupings of repeated 16th notes descending on a B minor scale in ‘Levitating’ but on a D major scale in ‘Don Diablo’.”
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Read more on the Court’s decision here:
Brown and Linzer’s attorney Jason Brown said they plan to appeal.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/music/news/dua-lipa-wins-levitating-copyright-case-with-a-little-help-from-ed-sheeran/ar-AA1BPBWu?ocid=hpmsn&cvid=dd1db94507594e5e80f54e4611ae64ed&ei=47
Photo: Dua Lipa tour poster