{"id":805041,"date":"2020-03-09T13:45:04","date_gmt":"2020-03-09T19:45:04","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.rollingstone.com\/?p=964530"},"modified":"2020-03-09T13:45:04","modified_gmt":"2020-03-09T19:45:04","slug":"a-new-led-zeppelin-court-win-over-stairway-to-heaven-just-upended-a-copyright-precedent","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/music-news\/a-new-led-zeppelin-court-win-over-stairway-to-heaven-just-upended-a-copyright-precedent\/","title":{"rendered":"A New Led Zeppelin Court Win Over \u2018Stairway to Heaven\u2019 Just Upended a Copyright Precedent"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Led Zeppelin<\/a> have won the appeal in the copyright<\/a> case over their signature song, \u201cStairway to Heaven.\u201d On Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2016 decision that \u201cStairway\u201d did not infringe on Spirit\u2019s 1968 instrumental track, \u201cTaurus,\u201d and in doing so upended a long-standing copyright precedent.<\/p>\n

The ruling<\/a> caps off a winding and complex legal case<\/a> that began in 2014 when Michael Skidmore \u2014 a trustee representing the estate of Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe \u2014 accused Jimmy Page and Robert Plant of stealing the opening guitar riff of \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d from \u201cTaurus.\u201d Zeppelin won the case in 2016, but in September 2018 a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit ruled that the original trial involved \u201cerroneous jury instructions\u201d and ordered a new trial.<\/p>\n

One aspect of the initial case the appeals court upheld was the district court\u2019s decision to deny Skidmore\u2019s request to play the sound recordings of \u201cTaurus\u201d and \u201cStairway to Heaven\u201d for the jury. That is because both songs are protected under the 1909 Copyright Act, which applies only to sheet music, while the 1976 Copyright Act includes sound recordings.<\/p>\n

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Skidmore\u2019s desire to play the two recordings also tied into his attempts to prove Zeppelin had access to \u201cTaurus.\u201d Proving access has long been key to proving two works are \u201csubstantially similar,\u201d but in its new ruling, the Ninth Circuit overturned a long-standing precedent in this realm known as the \u201cinverse ratio rule.\u201d (The inverse ratio rule holds that if one party can prove a high degree of access to a certain work, the less substantial the similarities need to be in order to prove infringement.)<\/p>\n

In his appeal, Skidmore objected to the lower court judge\u2019s decision not to instruct the jury on the inverse ratio rule. He believed this would\u2019ve helped his case because not only did Led Zeppelin and Spirit tour together in the late Sixties, but also because Page admitted during the trial that he had a copy of the Spirit album with \u201cTaurus\u201d in his collection (though he denied \u201cany knowledge\u201d of the song). If Skidmore could prove this much access, the similarities between the two songs wouldn\u2019t need to be overwhelming in order to prove infringement (this would\u2019ve been doubly helpful because the copyright complaint centered around just a few measures of music at the starts of \u201cStairway\u201d and \u201cTaurus\u201d).<\/p>\n

While the Ninth Circuit has used the inverse ratio rule in the past, other appeals courts have rejected it, and in his decision, Judge R. Gary Klausner said that because the inverse ratio rule \u201cdefies logic, and creates uncertainty for the courts and the parties, we take this opportunity to abrogate the rule in the Ninth Circuit and overrule our prior cases to the contrary.\u201d Klausner added that the application of the rule has been inconsistent in the Ninth Circuit, and notably mentioned the \u201cBlurred Lines\u201d case, where it was initially touted as \u201cbinding precedent,\u201d before all mention of it was later removed from an amended opinion.<\/p>\n

While Klausner showed the various flaws of the inverse ratio rule over the years, he noted its particular murkiness in the digital age where access is ostensibly infinite. \u201cTo the extent \u2018access\u2019 still has meaning, the inverse ratio rule unfairly advantages those whose work is most <\/i>accessible by lowering the standard of proof for similarity,\u201d Klausner wrote. \u201cBut noting in copyright law suggests that a work deserves stronger legal protection simply because it is more popular or owned by better-funded rights holders.\u201d<\/p>\n

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

Led Zeppelin have won the appeal in the copyright case over their signature song, \u201cStairway to Heaven.\u201d On Monday, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld a 2016 decision that \u201cStairway\u201d did not infringe on Spirit\u2019s 1968 instrumental track, \u201cTaurus,\u201d and in doing so upended a long-standing copyright precedent. The ruling caps off a winding […]<\/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":[98],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-805041","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-music-news"},"acf":[],"publishpress_future_action":{"enabled":false,"date":"2026-07-19 17:02:30","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":"KSMT The Mountain","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805041","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=805041"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/805041\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=805041"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=805041"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alwaysmountaintime.com\/ksmt\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=805041"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}