Led Zeppelin win plagiarism case over Stairway To Heaven

A US appeal court has restored a jury verdict that found the band did not steal Stairway To Heaven.

The 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco handed the major win to West Bromwich-born Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page and dealt a blow to the estate of Randy Wolfe of the band Spirit.

Wolfe, who performed as Randy California, drowned in 1997, but a trustee for his estate sought damages potentially reaching millions of dollars.

The estate had claimed that the 1971 mega-hit violated the copyright of a 1968 song called Taurus. At issue was the classic acoustic introduction to Stairway To Heaven – constantly played by amateurs in guitar shops for nearly 50 years – and the riff at the centre of the instrumental Taurus, which follows a similar line.

A majority of an 11-judge panel overturned a previous ruling that the jury in the 2016 trial should have heard the recording of Taurus and was given poor instructions before jurors found in favour of 71-year-old Plant and Page.

In a June 2016 verdict, jurors found that while Plant and Page had access to Taurus, its riff was not intrinsically similar to Stairway To Heaven.

Jurors were not allowed to listen to Taurus and Monday’s decision found this and other alleged errors did not require a new trial. The appeals court also dropped its “inverse ratio” rule, which says the more access songwriters have to earlier works, the lower the bar for proving substantial similarity.

The composition of the two songs, not their recordings, were at issue in the case.

The ruling found that because the jury found that Page did have access to the song then the issue was irrelevant, and playing the recording might have prejudiced the jury to consider more than just the compositions.

“When Page testified, he candidly admitted to owning ‘a copy of the album that contains Taurus’,” the ruling states.

The jury found both Plant, a Wolves fan who has a home near Wolverley, and Page ‘had access to the musical composition Taurus before Stairway To Heaven was created’, it said.

“Once the jury made that finding, the remaining questions on the jury verdict form related to substantial similarity of the works.”

But many of the judges were sceptical at the case’s hearing in September over the playing of the recording, suggesting it was a back-door way for the plaintiffs to get the jury to hear the record. “You’ve got to get your sound recording in to win, don’t you?” Judge Andrew D Hurwitz said as he questioned Wolfe estate lawyer Francis Malofiy. “You lose the case unless you do. A hundred times out of a hundred.”

The 9th Circuit also broke with its own precedent on the question of jury instructions and rejected the so-called “inverse ratio” rule, which held that the more the plaintiffs could prove that an alleged song thief had access to the original material, the lower the standard became for finding the two works similar.

The judge in the trial court did not instruct the jury on the rule. Monday’s decision found that he did not need to.

The ruling, which can be taken on appeal to the US Supreme Court, is a potentially precedent-setting win for musical acts that have been accused of plagiarism, and comes in a period when many star songwriters have lost high-profile cases.

Jurors decided in a 2015 trial Robin Thicke’s Blurred Lines copied Marvin Gaye’s Got To Give It Up, and a jury last year found Katy Perry’s Dark Horse was copied from a Christian rap song.