Dua Lipa is facing another lawsuit over her 2020 track ‘Levitating’.
The singer and Warner Music are being sued by producer Bosko Kante who claims he never granted the star permission to use his “talk box” recording in remixed versions.
In a lawsuit filed in a federal court on Monday (July 31), Kante said he created a so-called talk box track for use in Lipa’s original version of the song, but that the creators of the track had no right to use it in subsequent remixes.
According to Billboard, the producer’s lawyers, wrote: “Plaintiff made numerous attempts to resolve this matter short of litigation, but such efforts were unsuccessful, due to the defendants’ unwillingness to cooperate or accept responsibility for this blatant infringement of plaintiff’s copyrights.”
After contributing talk box performances for Kanye West and Big Boi, Kante launched a company called ElectroSpit in 2014 to sell a proprietary digital version of the device.
He claims that he was approached in 2014 by Stephen Kozmeniuk, one of producers of ‘Levitating’, about creating a talk box performance that would be incorporated into Lipa’s song.
Kante says he later did so, and eventually reached an oral agreement that the track could be used in ‘Levitating’.
But Kante argued that the deal expressly didn’t cover any further remixes beyond the original release meaning that Lipa and Warner Music didn’t have the right to use it on remixes by the likes of DaBaby and The Blessed Madonna.
“All three remixes sampled and incorporated a greater amount of plaintiff’s work than that used in the original version,” Kante’s lawyers added. “Defendants did not seek or receive any authorization or permission to use the composition or sound recording of plaintiff’s work from plaintiff.”
This is the third case that has been brought against Lipa over ‘Levitating’.
In March 2022, Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System, filed a lawsuit alleging that Lipa’s ‘Levitating’ copied the hook of their 2017 track ‘Live Your Life’. While their initial filing did not include explicit evidence as to how Lipa copied ‘Live Your Life’, the band alleged that she had “access” to the track.
But in June of this year, US District Judge Sunshine Sykes temporarily dismissed the case in favour of Lipa, saying that Artikal Sound System had been unable to substantiate their accusations. Although the case wasn’t completely closed, Artikal Sound System dropped any further action.
A second case filed by songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer also accused Lipa of borrowing the melody to her track from their 1979 song ‘Wiggle and Giggle All Night’ and their 1980 song ‘Don Diablo’. It is yet to go to court.
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