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Dua Lipa ‘Levitating’ Win, Tony Bennett Family Feud, Del Villar Guilty Verdict & More Music Law
In this week's Legal Beat, a copyright victory for Dua Lipa, an ugly fight among Tony Bennett's kids, a conviction for a top Latin music exec and much more.
This is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.
This week: Dua Lipa shuts down a copyright lawsuit over her smash hit “Levitating”; Tony Bennett’s daughters sue their brother over the late singer’s estate; Latin music exec Angel Del Villar is convicted of working with a promoter with links to Mexican cartels; and much more.
THE BIG STORY: Dua Lipa Levitates Out of Another Lawsuit
Back in March 2022, Dua Lipa was sued for copyright infringement twice in just four days over “Levitating,” her breakout hit that spent 77 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. But three years later, both cases are now dead and gone.
In a decision issued last week, a federal judge granted Lipa summary judgment in a lawsuit filed by songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer, who accused the superstar of ripping off their 1979 song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and their 1980 song “Don Diablo.”
The complaint cheekily claimed that Lipa “levitated away plaintiffs’ intellectual property,” but Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that there was essentially no IP to steal — that the songs shared only the kind of basic musical building blocks that are not covered by federal copyright law.
“It is possible that a ‘layperson’ could listen to portions of plaintiffs’ and defendants’ songs and hear similarities,” the judge wrote in her decision. “But … the similarity between the works concerns only non-copyrightable elements of the plaintiffs’ work.”
The other lawsuit against Lipa — filed by a Florida reggae band named Artikal Sound System over their 2015 track “Live Your Life” — was voluntarily dropped in 2023 after another judge ruled that there was no sign that anyone involved in creating “Levitating” had had “access” to the earlier song — a key requirement in any copyright lawsuit.
As we wrote back in 2022, it seems you’re not truly a pop star until you’ve been sued for copyright infringement a few times; just ask Taylor Swift, Ed Sheeran or Katy Perry. Now, Lipa can truly join that distinguished group — as someone who has not just faced such cases, but fought back and won.
Other top stories this week…
FAMILY FEUD – Tony Bennett’s daughters (Antonia and Johanna Bennett) expanded their legal battle against their older brother (D’Andrea “Danny” Bennett), claiming in a new lawsuit that he has “abused” his power over the late singer’s affairs to “enrich himself.” Echoing an earlier case, the sisters accused Danny of “improper and unlawful conduct” both before and after the legendary singer’s 2023 death, including “excessive and unearned commissions” and giving “gifts to himself and his children.” Danny’s lawyers have called such accusations “baseless” and argued he was “fully authorized to take the steps he took.”
GUILTY VERDICT – Latin music executive Angel Del Villar was convicted by a federal jury on felony charges of doing business with a concert promoter linked to Mexican drug cartels, setting the stage for a potential decades-long prison sentence for the Del Records CEO. Prosecutors alleged Del Villar had repeatedly arranged concerts with Jesus Pérez Alvear, a Guadalajara-based promoter subject to federal sanctions for helping cartels “exploit the Mexican music industry to launder drug proceeds and glorify their criminal activities.” Del Villar’s attorneys vowed to appeal the verdict, saying the jury “got it wrong.”
AI RULING – A federal judge issued a ruling denying Universal Music Group’s request for a preliminary injunction that would have immediately blocked artificial intelligence company Anthropic PBC from using copyrighted lyrics to train future AI models. The judge said that it remained an “open question” whether using copyrighted materials to train AI is illegal — something of a trillion-dollar question for the booming industry — meaning UMG and other music companies could not show that they faced the kind of “irreparable harm” necessary to win such a drastic remedy.
SAMPLING SPAT – Ye (formerly Kanye West) was hit with a copyright lawsuit claiming he sampled a song by German singer-songwriter Alice Merton despite her express refusal to license it to him because of his history of antisemitic statements. Merton said she’s the direct descendant of Holocaust survivors and that being involuntarily associated with the controversial rapper left her “shocked and humiliated.” The case is the latest of at least a dozen lawsuits West has faced over his career over allegations of unlicensed sampling or interpolating.
