{"id":5031,"date":"2025-04-01T22:43:58","date_gmt":"2025-04-01T22:43:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/dua-lipa-levitating-win-tony-bennett-family-feud-more-music-law\/"},"modified":"2025-04-01T22:43:58","modified_gmt":"2025-04-01T22:43:58","slug":"dua-lipa-levitating-win-tony-bennett-family-feud-more-music-law","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/dua-lipa-levitating-win-tony-bennett-family-feud-more-music-law\/","title":{"rendered":"Dua Lipa ‘Levitating’ Win, Tony Bennett Family Feud & More Music Law"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n

\n\tThis is The Legal Beat, a weekly newsletter about music law from <\/em>Billboard Pro, offering you a one-stop cheat sheet of big new cases, important rulings and all the fun stuff in between.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\tThis week: Dua Lipa shuts down a copyright lawsuit over her smash hit \u201cLevitating\u201d; Tony Bennett\u2019s daughters sue their brother over the late singer\u2019s estate; Latin music exec Angel Del Villar is convicted of working with a promoter with links to Mexican cartels; and much more.<\/em><\/p>\n

\n\t\tTHE BIG STORY: Dua Lipa Levitates Out of Another Lawsuit<\/strong>\t<\/h2>\n

\n\tBack in March 2022, Dua Lipa was sued for copyright infringement twice in just four days over \u201cLevitating,\u201d her breakout hit that spent 77 weeks on the Billboard Hot 100. But three years later, both cases are now dead and gone.<\/p>\n

\n\tIn 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 \u201cWiggle and Giggle All Night\u201d and their 1980 song \u201cDon Diablo.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe complaint cheekily claimed that Lipa \u201clevitated away plaintiffs\u2019 intellectual property,\u201d but Judge Katherine Polk Failla ruled that there was essentially no IP to steal \u2014 that the songs shared only the kind of basic musical building blocks that are not covered by federal copyright law.<\/p>\n

\n\t\u201cIt is possible that a \u2018layperson\u2019 could listen to portions of plaintiffs\u2019 and defendants\u2019 songs and hear similarities,\u201d the judge wrote in her decision. \u201cBut \u2026 the similarity between the works concerns only non-copyrightable elements of the plaintiffs\u2019 work.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tThe other lawsuit against Lipa \u2014 filed by a Florida reggae band named Artikal Sound System over their 2015 track \u201cLive Your Life\u201d \u2014 was voluntarily dropped<\/a> in 2023 after another judge ruled in her favor that there was no sign that anyone involved in creating \u201cLevitating\u201d had had \u201caccess\u201d to the earlier song \u2014 a key requirement in any copyright lawsuit.<\/p>\n

\n\tAs we wrote back in 2022, it seems you\u2019re not truly a pop star until you\u2019ve 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 \u2014 as someone who has not just faced such cases, but fought back and won.<\/p>\n

\n\t\tOther top stories this week\u2026<\/strong>\t<\/h2>\n

\n\tFAMILY FEUD<\/strong> \u2013 Tony Bennett\u2019s daughters (Antonia and Johanna Bennett) expanded their legal battle against their older brother (D\u2019Andrea \u201cDanny\u201d Bennett), claiming in a new lawsuit that he has \u201cabused\u201d his power over the late singer\u2019s affairs to \u201cenrich himself.\u201d Echoing an earlier case, the sisters accused Danny of \u201cimproper and unlawful conduct\u201d both before and after the legendary singer\u2019s 2023 death, including \u201cexcessive and unearned commissions\u201d and giving \u201cgifts to himself and his children.\u201d Danny\u2019s lawyers have called such accusations \u201cbaseless\u201d and argued he was \u201cfully authorized to take the steps he took.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tGUILTY VERDICT <\/strong>\u2013 Latin music executive Angel Del Villar <\/strong>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 P\u00e9rez Alvear<\/strong>, a Guadalajara-based promoter subject to federal sanctions for helping cartels \u201cexploit the Mexican music industry to launder drug proceeds and glorify their criminal activities.\u201d Del Villar\u2019s attorneys vowed to appeal the verdict, saying the jury \u201cgot it wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tAI RULING <\/strong>\u2013 A federal judge issued a ruling denying Universal Music Group\u2019s 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 \u201copen question\u201d whether using copyrighted materials to train AI is illegal \u2014 something of a trillion-dollar question for the booming industry \u2014 meaning UMG and other music companies could not show that they faced the kind of \u201cirreparable harm\u201d necessary to win such a drastic remedy.<\/p>\n

\n\tSAMPLING SPAT<\/strong> \u2013 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\u2019s the direct descendant of Holocaust survivors and that being involuntarily associated with the controversial rapper left her \u201cshocked and humiliated.\u201d The case is the latest of at least a dozen lawsuits West has faced over his career over allegations of unlicensed sampling or interpolating.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5032,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[5320,5260,5321,4557,153,5262,5261,593,5158,834],"class_list":["post-5031","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-bennett","tag-dua","tag-family","tag-feud","tag-law","tag-levitating","tag-lipa","tag-music","tag-tony","tag-win"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5031","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5031"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5031\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5032"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5031"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5031"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5031"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}