{"id":490371,"date":"2019-09-21T14:10:16","date_gmt":"2019-09-21T20:10:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=879298"},"modified":"2019-09-21T14:10:16","modified_gmt":"2019-09-21T20:10:16","slug":"led-zeppelins-stairway-to-heaven-goes-to-court-again-on-monday","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/music-news\/led-zeppelins-stairway-to-heaven-goes-to-court-again-on-monday\/","title":{"rendered":"Led Zeppelin\u2019s \u2018Stairway to Heaven\u2019 Goes to Court (Again) on Monday"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The music business will experience collective d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu next week when Led Zeppelin<\/a> goes back to court facing claims that it ripped off its signature \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d from Spirit\u2019s \u201cTaurus.\u201d But this time, the stakes are much higher.<\/p>\n

After being tossed through years of flip-flopping decisions<\/a>, the \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d case \u2014 in which Michael Skidmore, a trustee representing the estate of Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe, is accusing Led Zeppelin of stealing its 1971 song\u2019s opening guitar riff from Spirit\u2019s 1968 instrumental track \u2014 will come before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco for en banc (full court) arguments on Monday, September 23rd. While jurors in the original case had decided in 2016 that \u201cStairway\u201d did not infringe on \u201cTaurus,\u201d a Ninth Circuit panel ordered a new trial in 2018 due to errors in the jury instruction process.<\/p>\n

The trial has gained much new attention since \u2014 especially as music copyright cases have exploded in number, with cases against Katy Perry\u2019s \u201cDark Horse\u201d and Ed Sheeran\u2019s smash hit \u201cThinking Out Loud\u201d among numerous, high-profile examples<\/a>. Now, all eyes are on the Zeppelin-Spirit case because of both the iconic nature of the central song and the broader framework on how copyright law can be applied to music going forward.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe en blanc review is an uncommon act for a court of appeals,\u201d Wesley Lewis, an attorney at corporate law firm Haynes and Boone who specializes in copyright cases, tells Rolling Stone<\/em>. \u201cIt signals that there is enough interest in this legal question that it could conceivably go all the way up to the Supreme Court.\u201d Lewis notes that while the original case focused singularly on whether \u201cTaurus\u201d was the foundation for \u201cStairway to Heaven,\u201d the new case is likely to examine two bigger issues: the \u201camount of expression required to constitute original, protectable work\u201d and how much of a role physical deposit copies<\/a> should play in copyright protection. \u201cThe issues have now been defined a little more sharply,\u201d Lewis says.<\/p>\n

Francis Malofiy, the attorney representing Wolfe\u2019s estate, tells Rolling Stone<\/em> that he expects \u201ceveryone to be there\u201d on Monday, from copyright lawyers to musicologists to music executives to songwriters who\u2019ve publicly sided<\/a> with Led Zeppelin. Each side will have 30 minutes to speak; Malofiy will speak for all of his side\u2019s 30 minutes, while the defendants (Jimmy Page and co.) plan to cede 10 minutes of their time to the U.S. Department of Justice. Last month, the DOJ filed a 55-page amicus brief<\/a> in support of the previous judge\u2019s ruling that said copyrights of musical compositions prior to 1972 are only protected as sheet music. (Page and Robert Plant are not expected to attend.)<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Department of Justice is making a laughable argument,\u201d Malofiy says. \u201cThe defendants, the music industry<\/a>, the publishers, the songwriters standing with Led Zeppelin \u2014 they\u2019re trying to engage in the largest art heist of all time. They\u2019re trying to say that any current artist can steal anything from the past and change it ever so slightly, and now they can\u2019t be sued.\u201d A rep for the Department of Justice did not immediately reply to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

His stance has not been met with much agreement in the music industry, which largely contests that the current scope of copyright law as it applies to artists and songwriters is too broad. The last few years have seen a wave of successful lawsuits that allege hit songs to have been ripped off from more obscure tracks \u2014 the most recent example being Christian rapper Flame\u2019s victory in his suit against Katy Perry\u2019s \u201cDark Horse.\u201d<\/a> Plaintiffs in plagiarism cases are \u201ctrying to own basic building blocks of music, the alphabet of music that should be available to everyone,\u201d said Christine Lepera, Perry\u2019s lawyer, in closing arguments in the \u201cDark Horse\u201d trial. Others note that a new generation of keepers for artists\u2019 estates has pushed courts to consider more music copyright cases about older songs. Sandy Wilbur, a forensic musicologist who served as an expert witness on the infamous 2015 \u201cBlurred Lines\u201d case involving Robin Thicke, Pharrell Williams and Marvin Gaye, told Rolling Stone<\/em> in 2018 that her \u201clast two years have been my busiest years ever.\u201d<\/p>\n

In the original Zeppelin-Spirit trial, a U.S. district judge had told jurors that \u201ccommon musical elements, such as descending chromatic scales, arpeggios or short sequences of three notes\u201d are not protected by copyright \u2014 but the Ninth Circuit panel ruled that they should have been told notes can<\/em> sometimes be copyrighted if they are selected and arranged in an original way.<\/p>\n

Whatever outcome emerges from the Zeppelin-Spirit case is also likely to have broad ramifications outside of music, which is why lawyers from various industries are watching the case with interest. \u201cThe Ninth Circuit will be forced to consider the amount of expression that\u2019s required in order to constitute something that\u2019s protectable,\u201d Lewis says. \u201cIn music, that\u2019s things like a descending chromatic scale. But there are analogs in all sorts of different areas \u2014 for example, in software, when is a specific line of code copyrightable? In the choreography space, when does a series of steps become copyrightable? Litigators and practitioners are hopeful that this en banc opinion will establish more clarity going forward.\u201d<\/p>\n

via:: Rolling Stone<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The music business will experience collective d\u00e9j\u00e0 vu next week when Led Zeppelin goes back to court facing claims that it ripped off its signature \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d from Spirit\u2019s \u201cTaurus.\u201d But this time, the stakes are much higher. After being tossed through years of flip-flopping decisions, the \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d case \u2014 in which […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[56],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-490371","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","category-music-news"],"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-08-21 13:00:44","action":"change-status","newStatus":"draft","terms":[],"taxonomy":"category","extraData":[]},"publishpress_future_workflow_manual_trigger":{"enabledWorkflows":[]},"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"KQZR - The Reel","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490371","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=490371"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/490371\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=490371"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=490371"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/kqzr\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=490371"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}