Jimmy Page took the stand on June 15, 2016. The Led Zeppelin guitarist’s time in court came amid a legal battle over the band’s song, “Stairway to Heaven.”
Page found himself in court over the opening guitar riff on their 1971 track. Michael Skidmore, a trustee representing the estate of Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe, accused both Page and Robert Plant of stealing the riff from Spirit’s 1968 track, “Taurus.”
While on the stand, Page denied stealing the riff. He added that he hadn’t heard “Taurus” until the controversy over its similarities to his work began circulating online.
He did, however, admit to owning albums by Spirit, including their debut LP on which the song in question appeared. Page said he could not recall how it became part of his collection and held firm on his position that he hadn’t heard the track.
Led Zeppelin wound up winning the case in 2016, but that wasn’t the end of the story. Two years later, a three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit ruled that the original trial involved “erroneous jury instructions” and ordered a new trial.
Then, in 2020, the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals upheld the original trial’s verdict, thus officially giving Page and Zeppelin their win. Several months later, the Supreme Court declined to hear the case, which ended the saga for good.
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Why Did Led Zeppelin Win the Legal Case?
The decision was one that changed legal precedent, specifically as it related to the inverse ratio rule. The rule, which was used in previous similar cases, essentially stated that, if someone could prove the accused party had access to the work in question, the less similar the two pieces of music have to be to find infringement.
“What you have here is a big win for the multi-billion dollar industry against the creatives. I love Led Zeppelin, as a man, and I can separate my appreciation for them as four band members playing amazing music, but they’re the greatest art thieves of all time and they got away with it again today,” Skidmore’s lawyer, Francis Malofiy, told Rolling Stone at the time. “They won on a technicality. But they absolutely stole that piece of work.”
As for why the court opted to do away with the inverse ration rule, according to the outlet, Judge R. Gary Klausner wrote in his decision that it “defies logic, and creates uncertainty for the courts and the parties.”
“To the extent ‘access’ still has meaning, the inverse ratio rule unfairly advantages those whose work is most accessible by lowering the standard of proof for similarity,” Klausner wrote, per the outlet. “But 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.”
