Zeppelin prevails in Stairway legal appeal
Stairway To Heaven is an original — no new trial needed.
That is the upshot of an appellate court’s decision, announced this week, which upheld a jury’s verdict that Led Zeppelin’s 1971 classic did not copy
Taurus, a much-lesser-known song by guitarist and singer Randy Wolfe that was recorded in 1968 by his band Spirit.
Although Led Zeppelin had been accused of plagiarism plenty of times before, the Stairway case came under close scrutiny in the music industry both because the song is the band’s signature accomplishment — an eight-minute odyssey that by some estimates has earned more than US$500 million (15.7 billion baht) — and because it followed another closely watched trial, over Robin Thicke’s song
Blurred Lines.
In that case, Thicke and Pharrell Williams, the song’s principal writers, were ordered to pay more than $5 million to the family of Marvin Gaye, a decision that many songwriters, lawyers and academics have criticised as harmful to creativity.
In 2016, a jury in the Stairway case found that Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of Led Zeppelin, the song’s two credited writers, did not infringe on the copyright of Taurus. The band’s lawyers argued that what little the two songs had in common — a chord progression and a descending chromatic scale — were musical elements too basic to be protected by copyright. A musicologist testifying on Led Zeppelin’s behalf said that similar patterns have popped up in music for more than 300 years.
An unusual appeals process followed. In 2018, an appeals court ordered a new trial, saying the jury had not received proper instructions. But last year, the ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals, in San Francisco, decided to rehear the case en banc, or before a full panel of 11 judges. Even the Trump administration weighed in, with a Justice Department brief supporting Led Zeppelin.
Part of the Stairway appeal came down to the minutiae of what was copyrighted in Taurus. Before 1978, songs had to be submitted through sheet music to the Copyright Office. Francis Malofiy, the lawyer for the plaintiff — a trustee for the songs of Wolfe, also known as Randy California, who died in 1997 — argued that in the case of Taurus this so-called deposit copy was incomplete, and that the full composition of the song was “embodied” in Spirit’s album recording.
In their decision, the appellate judges rejected this, saying that by law the deposit copy was considered complete. The appellate judges rejected Malofiy’s other arguments, including his claims about insufficient jury instructions and about copyright applied to the “selection and arrangement” of commonplace musical elements. In an interview, Malofiy said he was disappointed by the decision, and was considering whether to appeal the case further.
“The court got it wrong,” Malofiy said. “Led Zeppelin can be happy they won on a technicality, but that does not mean they won on the merits. Anyone who has heard the two songs at issue knows it is a blatant ripoff.” Led Zeppelin declined to comment.