Dua Lipa Wins ‘Levitating’ Copyright Case, Judge Dismisses Lawsuit

Finally, a reason for sugarboo to levitate. Dua Lipa will no longer have to prove that she did not rip off L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer’s 1979 disco song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” when she and others wrote the monster hit “Levitating.”

U.S. District Judge Katherine Polk Failla dismissed their suit in a Manhattan court on Thursday. The judge ruled in a written statement, reviewed by Rolling Stone, that Lipa’s song did not bear enough similarity to “Wiggle and Giggle” for a trial.

Songwriters Brown and Linzer had claimed that Lipa copied the “Wiggle” melody and elements of another song by the duo, “Don Diablo.” Judge Failla cited a federal appeals court decision from last year that Ed Sheeran did not plagiarize Marvin Gaye, and that the melodies in both “Levitating” and “Wiggle” also sounded similar to musical phrases composed by Wolfgang Mozart, Gioachino Rossini, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Bee Gees — specifically “Stayin’ Alive.”

“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,” Judge Failla wrote.

Lipa’s lawyer had argued that she and the other songwriters “never heard” the song “Wiggle and Giggle” or “Don Diablo.” “The alleged similarities — a descending scale in which each pitch is repeated on evenly spaced notes and a common clave rhythm— are unprotectable, and the result of the coincidental use of basic musical building blocks,” attorney Christine Lepera wrote in 2022.

Following Thursday’s dismissal, Lepera tells Rolling Stone, “We are very pleased with the summary judgment decision, and with the Court’s recognition that music building blocks exist and are accessible to all creators.”

Attorney Jason Brown, who reps Brown (his uncle) and Linzer, intends to appeal Judge Failla’s decision. “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 tells Rolling Stone. “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.”

A rep for Lipa and other defendants did not immediately respond to Rolling Stone’s request for comment.

In 2023, another judge, Sunshine Sykes, dismissed a case against Lipa in which a reggae group, Artikal Sound System, claimed she had copied their song, “Live Your Life,” for “Levitating.”