Led Zeppelin win Stairway To Heaven copyright battle
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British rock band Led Zeppelin on Monday effectively won a long running legal battle over claims it stole the opening guitar riff from its signature 1971 song, 'Stairway to Heaven.'
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LOS ANGELES • British rockers Led Zeppelin have won a long-running legal dispute over the band's classic song, Stairway To Heaven, after the United States Supreme Court on Monday refused to take up a copyright claim over the case.
A lower court in California last March had ruled that Led Zeppelin had not swiped the song's opening riff from Taurus, which was written by the late Randy Wolfe of a Los Angeles band called Spirit.
The decision on Monday by the country's highest court not to hear the case definitively ends the legal challenges which had been closely watched by the music industry.
Led Zeppelin had initially won the case in 2016, with the court at the time finding no proof that the 1971 classic breached the copyright of Taurus. However, that ruling was overturned on appeal in 2018.
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page - who was sued along with the group's singer Robert Plant and another surviving bandmate John Paul Jones - testified in 2016 that the chord sequence in question had "been around forever".
Wolfe's trustee, Mr Michael Skidmore, filed the case in 2014 on behalf of his friend, who long maintained he deserved credit for Stairway, but Wolfe drowned in 1997, having never taken legal action over the song.
Experts called by the plaintiffs at the lower court trial said there were substantial similarities between key parts of the two songs.
However, defence witnesses testified that the chord pattern used in the melancholic guitar intro to Stairway was so commonplace that copyright did not apply.
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
