A federal judge has officially dismissed a long-running copyright lawsuit against Dua Lipa, ruling that she did not infringe on two decades-old tracks to create Levitating.
Judge Katherine Failla ended the case by granting Dua Lipa’s motion for summary judgment. The copyright dispute began in early 2022, following the October 2020 release of Levitating.
To summarize, the plaintiffs, including Larball Publishing Company, alleged that Lipa and her collaborators had copied elements from two older songs: 1979’s Wiggle and Giggle All Night and the 1980 Spanish-language track Don Diablo.
As is common in copyright infringement cases, both sides brought in expert witnesses to support their claims. However, Lipa’s legal team argued that the plaintiffs’ experts were not entirely impartial.
While Judge Failla dismissed the lawsuit, she also rejected the defense’s request to completely exclude the opposing expert testimonies.
She determined that, despite Lipa’s concerns over methodology and potential bias, the reports “meet the standard for reliability.”
Dua Lipa (Photo: Getty Images)One notable aspect of her ruling is that she did agree to exclude “impermissible conclusions of law” from the reports.
The court stated that, in directly alleging copyright infringement—rather than merely analyzing technical similarities—the plaintiffs’ experts “usurp the role of the factfinder in applying the law to the facts.”
Regarding the core issue of summary judgment, Judge Failla noted that the plaintiffs’ claim ultimately boiled down to “one descending scale plus one additional identical note.”
Citing precedents such as Structured Asset Sales v. Ed Sheeran, she ruled that these elements—whether individually or combined—are not protectable under copyright law.
“More fundamentally,” she wrote, “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 to hold otherwise would be to completely foreclose the further development of music in that genre or for that purpose.”
With that, the case was officially closed. This lawsuit was just one of multiple copyright claims filed against Lipa over Levitating.
