Academic

CLOSE THE DOOR, PUT OUT THE LIGHT: Led Zeppelin?s ?Stairway To Heaven? copyright battle is final?

By Ed Driscoll

CLOSE THE DOOR, PUT OUT THE LIGHT: Led Zeppelin’s ?Stairway To Heaven? copyright battle is finally over.

The band were sued for copyright in 2014 over claims they had stolen the song’s opening riff from ?Taurus,? by a US band called Spirit.

Led Zeppelin won the case in 2016, but it was revived on appeal in 2018.

A court of appeals upheld the original verdict earlier this year. Now, the US Supreme Court has declined to hear the case, definitively ending it.

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The jury rejected Page and Plant’s argument that they would not have been familiar with Taurus, saying they had “access” to it.

However, they found evidence from musicologists more convincing. Experts who testified said the descending musical pattern shared by both songs had been a common musical device for centuries. One example cited was ?Chim Chim Cher-ee,? from the 1964 Disney musical Mary Poppins.

There are loads of pop songs built on chords with descending bass lines, a topic Rick Beato explored in his 2018 video on the lawsuit:

And speaking of Beato and “Stairway,” in his latest video, he answers a question that nobody is asking: what would the “Stairway” guitar solo sound like if Peter Frampton, Eddie Van Halen or Eric Johnson had played it, with the role of Eric Johnson played by…Eric Johnson:

Full post as published by Instapundit.com on October 05, 2020 (boomark / email).