Letting her hair down with friends on a beach Down Under, pop star Dua Lipa looks like she doesn’t have a care in the world.
Indeed, any little worries she was having that day – perhaps about a musical copyright case she was fighting – will have evaporated completely by now.
Hours later, Ms Lipa, 29, scored a victory in a US court after the judge dismissed a lawsuit alleging that her 2020 hit Levitating plagiarised elements from two disco tracks.
The British-Albanian singer is in Australia on the latest leg of her Radical Optimism world tour.
But she managed to enjoy some down time at Tamarama Beach, Sydney, this week, and posed for selfies with fans – lifeguards among them – who had spotted her.
The lawsuit, filed in 2022 by American songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, claimed that Levitating copied the melody from their 1979 compositions Wiggle And Giggle All Night and 1980’s Don Diablo.
On Thursday, US district judge Katherine Polk Failla, sitting in Manhattan, New York, ruled that similarities between Ms Lipa’s and the plaintiffs’ songs were generic and involved musical elements that could not be protected.
She noted that such melodic components have been ‘used for centuries’, citing works by Mozart and the Bee Gees’ Stayin’ Alive as examples.
British-Albanian pop icon Dua Lipa was spotted at Tamarama Beach in Sydney, Australia
The star let her hair down with friends in Australia, which she is visiting for the latest leg of her Radical Optimism world tour
Songwriters L Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, accused Dua Lipa of plagiarising 1979’s Wiggle And Giggle All Night and 1980’s Don Diablo. Pictured: artist Cory Daye performing Wiggle And Giggle All Night in 1979
Judge Failla referenced a 2023 case in which singer-songwriter Ed Sheeran, 34, was accused of copying elements of Marvin Gaye’s 1973 track Let’s Get It On in his 2014 hit Thinking Out Loud.
The judge in that case also found that the two songs shared only ‘fundamental musical building blocks’.
It is the second time Ms Lipa has successfully defended Levitating, which spent six weeks in the top ten after its release.
In 2023 a lawsuit filed by Florida reggae band Artikal Sound System was dismissed after a judge found no evidence that Ms Lipa and her co-writers had access to the group’s 2015 track Live Your Life, which they alleged was copied.
