[lhorie]

IMHO, the similarity angle is nearly a red herring. "Girl from Rio" by Anitta is unequivocally a copy of "Girl from Ipanema" but it has proper attribution so there's no problem. What really matters is this chain of attribution: For Levitating, did Dua Lipa collaborate w/ Artikal Sound System or otherwise appropriate artistic output from them in a more significant capacity than any other permutation of song pairs from the other dozen similar songs? And if so, was Artikal Sound System cheated out of income? I'd argue that no, and that they probably are getting more publicity from the whole stunt than they otherwise would have.

There's a bazillion examples of flat out copying being considered perfectly fine: the lyrics for Anne Marie's "2002" clearly uses iconic lyrics from Britney Spears pretty much verbatim, and in a way that is obviously intended to refer to Britney, but the thing is that many many other artists before her have done similar homages (e.g. Calvin Harris' "My Way" references Sinatra's, etc) so there's a fairly strong reason to believe that a lawsuit based solely on similarity grounds would go nowhere.