LOS ANGELES (CelebrityAccess) – Pop songstress Dua Lipa is facing another copyright infringement lawsuit over her 2020 hit song “Levitating,” this time from California native and producer Bosko Kante – who claims the British singer used his work in the song’s remixes without his permission.
Kante, a music engineer, producer and entrepreneur, filed the complaint on Monday (July 31) with the US District Court for the Central District of California. The complaint states that Stephen Kozmeniuk, one of the producers credited with the song, approached Kante in 2019, asking him to create a talk box vocal to be used on the song. The complaint, obtained by MBW.com, can be read in full here.
Howstuffworks.com says a talk box device “takes advantage of the unique qualities of the human mouth and vocal tract and lends them to instruments.”
Kante agreed and recorded a talk box performance to be used on the song, despite “multiple” attempts at coming to a licensing agreement for the performance, the complaint alleges.
According to the complaint, Kante and the song’s producers finally came to an oral agreement for his performance to appear on the original album version of the song – but not any future remixes.
Despite this alleged oral agreement, the complaint states that Kante’s performance appeared on three remixes of “Levitating,” including the remix featuring rapper DaBaby. The DaBaby version of the song has become the most successful, with 767 million views of the song’s video on YouTube and 1.8 billion streams on Spotify.
This isn’t Lipa’s first involvement in a copyright infringement suit. In March 2022, a band called Artikal Sound System filed a lawsuit alleging that “Levitating” is “substantially similar” to their track “Live Your Life.”
Kante was also named a co-defendant in that lawsuit, along with Lipa, Kozmeniuk, songwriters Sarah Hudson and Clarence Coffee Jr., and Warner Records.
That lawsuit was dismissed in June 2023, with a federal district court judge in California concluding that Artikal Sound System had failed to prove that the defendants had an opportunity to hear and copy “Live Your Life.”
In another lawsuit, songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer claimed that Lipa ripped off their song from 1979, called “Wiggle and Giggle All Night.”
Kante’s new complaint against Lipa alleges that his work also appeared on a remix of the song from DJ Blessed Madonna, which features Madonna and Missy Elliott, and which has been streamed 55 million times on Spotify, as well as a third remix created in 2022 for the American Music Awards.
“All three remixes sampled and incorporated a greater amount of plaintiff’s work than that used in the original version, including, but not limited to, additional lyrics and melody created by the plaintiff, which do not appear in the original version,” the complaint alleges.
“Plaintiff made numerous attempts to resolve this matter short of litigation, but such efforts were unsuccessful, due to defendants’ unwillingness to cooperate or accept responsibility for this blatant infringement of plaintiff’s copyrights,” the complaint adds.
The lawsuit seeks at least $2 million plus interest in damages and profits made from the remixes, which it estimates as being at least $20 million.
The lawsuit names Dua Lipa, Kozmeniuk and Warner Music Group as defendants, along with ten unnamed defendants that the complaint says were individuals or companies that were involved with the named defendants in violating Kante’s copyright.
“Levitating” is one of the biggest hit songs of recent years. Appearing on Lipa’s sophomore album, Future Nostalgia, it holds the record for the longest-charting song by a female artist on the US Billboard 100, having spent 77 weeks on the chart in 2020 and 2021.
According to Kante’s bio on the company’s website, he has worked with the music of such artists as Kanye West, Drake, Tupac and J. Cole.
