Dua Lipa and talk box musician Bosko Kante have agreed to end the lawsuit over the use of his performance in three later versions of “Levitating.” A joint filing in federal court in Los Angeles on November 9 closes the case with prejudice. Each side will cover its own legal costs, and the filing discloses no financial terms or ruling on the underlying claims.
Dua Lipa and Bosko Kante have brought their dispute over “Levitating” to a close ahead of a planned trial in 2027. The November 9 filing in California federal court was submitted jointly by lawyers for Kante and for Lipa, co-writer and producer Stephen Kozmeniuk, and Warner Records. It ends the entire action with prejudice, barring Kante from bringing the same claims again.
The filing says each side will pay its own costs and attorneys’ fees. It gives no figure for a payment and does not say whether any song credits will change. The parties ended the case before a trial could establish whether the later recordings fell within the permission Kante says he gave for the original track.
That permission was the central issue from the time Kante sued in July 2023. He had contributed a talk box performance to “Levitating” and said he had agreed orally to its use on the original recording. In his complaint, he argued that the arrangement did not cover remixes and that additional permission was needed to use his recorded performance in them.
A talk box lets a performer shape an instrument’s sound with movements of the mouth, producing the vocal-like effect heard on records across funk, pop and hip-hop. Kante is a co-founder of ElectroSpit, which makes a wearable version of the device. His lawsuit concerned the specific sound he recorded for the Dua Lipa track and the uses to which that recording was put.
The complaint identified three later versions. One featured DaBaby. A second, remixed by The Blessed Madonna, featured Madonna and Missy Elliott. The third was a version made for the American Music Awards. Kante alleged that all three used material from his recording outside the terms he had agreed to for the album track.
Lawyers for Dua Lipa and the other defendants asked the court to dismiss the copyright claim. In September 2024, the judge allowed it to go forward, concluding that Kante did not have to identify the alleged reuse second by second at that stage. Defence counsel had acknowledged that at least some of the recording had been used. The question of whether that use fell within the agreement remained open.
The case was due to go to trial in March 2027. The joint filing takes it off that path, leaving the scope of the oral agreement unresolved by a judge or jury. The result closes the last known pending case among the three major disputes involving “Levitating,” which reached listeners in several versions after its 2020 release on Future Nostalgia.
The first of the earlier suits was brought by the reggae band Artikal Sound System. The band alleged that the Dua Lipa song infringed its 2017 track “Live Your Life.” In 2023, a California judge found that the complaint had not adequately alleged that the creators of “Levitating” had a chance to hear the earlier track. The parties subsequently agreed to end that case with prejudice.
A separate dispute involved works associated with songwriters L. Russell Brown and Sandy Linzer. It concerned alleged similarities to the disco song “Wiggle and Giggle All Night” and to “Don Diablo,” a song to which they had acquired rights. In March 2025, a federal judge in New York granted judgment in favour of Dua Lipa, finding that the shared musical elements did not amount to protected expression that supported the infringement claim.
Kante’s role in the recording gave the latest case a different starting point. The prior suits centred on comparisons with existing compositions. This dispute began with an acknowledged contribution to the original song and turned on what could be done with that performance once new versions were being made. The recordings named in the suit illustrate how far those versions travelled, from a remix with two guest performers to a version prepared for an awards show.
On the Billboard Hot 100, “Levitating” reached No. 2 and spent 77 weeks on the chart. It became one of the defining songs of the Future Nostalgia campaign for Dua Lipa. The album recording and its remixes gave the song different routes into circulation, with the DaBaby version among the releases specifically identified in Kante’s filing.
The closing document is brief compared with the questions the case raised about how a studio contribution can be reused. The parties agreed that the action would end and that each would bear its own fees and costs. Any private terms beyond what appears in the filing remain undisclosed, and the March trial that could have resolved the disagreement will no longer take place.
