Led Zeppelin win Stairway To Heaven plagiarism case

LED Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did not plagiarise a song by the American band Spirit when they wrote Stairway To Heaven, a jury has found.
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, left, and singer Robert Plant. Picture: APLed Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, left, and singer Robert Plant. Picture: AP
Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page, left, and singer Robert Plant. Picture: AP

The veteran rock stars appeared at a federal court in Los Angeles to deny claims that the guitar intro to the 1971 song was “lifted” from an instrumental track called Taurus.

A lawsuit was filed by Michael Skidmore, the trustee of Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe - known as Randy California - who drowned in 1997 having never taken legal action over the song.

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Following a week-long trial, a jury of four men and four women found Taurus and Stairway To Heaven were not “extrinsically similar”

During the trial, guitarist Page said he owned five Spirit albums but he had never watched the band play live and Taurus was “totally alien” to him.

He said he first heard the 1968 song when his son-in-law showed him a comparison with Stairway To Heaven on the internet a few years ago.

“I knew I had never heard it before. Something like that would have stuck in my mind,” Page told the court.

“I was a bit confused because I thought, ‘What has this got to do with Stairway To Heaven?’.”

Page, 72, said he wrote the music for Stairway To Heaven at Headley Grange Manor House in Hampshire, as the earliest surviving recording of the song was played to the court.

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Denying claims that he copied Taurus, Page compared Stairway To Heaven to Chim Chim Cher-ee from the Disney film Mary Poppins because they both had a chord sequence that has “been around forever”.

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