Led Zeppelin Have Won Their Plagiarism Trial Over 'Stairway To Heaven'
Led Zeppelin did not lift a guitar riff used in its signature song "Stairway to Heaven" from the USA group Spirit, a Los Angeles jury found on Thursday, saying there were substantial differences between the two.
British rock group Led Zeppelin did not steal the intro to their signature track Stairway to Heaven from a long-defunct Los Angeles rock band, a jury has found. "We appreciate our fans' support and look forward to putting this legal matter behind us".
The case was brought on behalf of Spirit's late guitarist, Randy Wolfe.
On 11 April 2016 a Los Angeles district judge, Gary Klausner, ruled that there were enough similarities between the song and the instrumental for a jury to decide the claim and a trial was scheduled for 10 May.
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The estate of late Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe is now under the ownership of trustee Michael Skidmore, a former music journalist, and was represented by attorney Francis Malofiy, who brought the lawsuit forward in 2014.
Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, vocalist Robert Plant and bassist John Paul Jones also testified at trial, saying that they did not remember seeing Spirit play live, despite the fact that the bands shared bills during Zeppelin's early years.
So they listened as musicologists either plucked out the two tunes on a guitar or tapped them out on an electric piano, along with other pop songs containing chromatic progressions.
After the verdict, Page and Plant put out a joint statement.
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Isaac Lee Deleon of San Angelo, who was the only soldier from Texas and had only been in the military since November. "It's going to be a slow drain", he said in a telephone interview.
"They won on a technicality", plaintiff lawyer Francis Malofiy told reporters at the courthouse, EW reports. "45 years later for the delay you caused?" After he died in 1997, Skidmore asserted an ownership interest in copyrighted sheet music and was able to push the case to trial despite decades of inaction and non-cooperation from Hollenbeck Music, the publishing company that had signed Randy Wolfe (performing as Randy California) in the 1960s as a teenager who was discovered by Jimi Hendrix. He maintained that California, whose birth name was Randy Wolfe, deserves one-third of the writing credit for "Stairway" and that damages should be between $3 million and $13.5 million. The case centres on the descending chord sequence at the beginning of their song, and its alleged similarity to a part of Taurus.
The prosecution had argued Led Zeppelin became familiar with Spirit's song after the two bands played on the same bill in Plant's hometown at a club in the English city of Birmingham in 1970.
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