Stairway to Heaven: Led Zeppelin wins the judicial saga [VIDEO]

John Paul Jones, Jimmy Page, Robert Plant and Jason Bonham (son of the late John Bonham), in 2012.

Share October 5, 2020 Updated October 6, 2020 at 3:24 pm Share Stairway to Heaven : Led Zeppelin wins the legal saga [VIDEO] Agence France-Presse LOS ANGELES – The legendary British rock group Led Zeppelin officially won the legal battle on Monday six years ago by the heirs of a Californian group who accused him of plagiarism in his global success Stairway to Heaven , released in 1971.

Last resort of the plaintiffs, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to take up this case, thus making final the previous judgments which considered that Led Zeppelin was indeed the author of this rock classic, which brought in millions of dollars. .

Last March, a San Francisco appeals court upheld a judgment rendered at first instance in Los Angeles in 2016 that Stairway to Heaven did not copy the instrumental track Taurus , composed by Spirit, a psychedelic group from the 1960s who did not has never exceeded esteem success.

At the time, the judges ruled that Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page had had access to Spirit's song. But the plaintiffs, who claimed between $ 3 million and $ 13 million in copyright, had failed to prove that elements of Taurus were “intrinsically similar” to the introduction of Stairway to Heaven , which took more than two minutes.

In 2016, Jimmy Page had said at the bar that the series of agreements at the heart of the plagiarism trial “had always circulated”.

In 2018, however, this judgment was quashed during a first appeal procedure, for legal reasons.

The members of Led Zeppelin had therefore requested and obtained a review of this judgment by the San Francisco Court of Appeal.

Stairway to Heaven Live LED ZEPPELIN Led Zeppelin

The civil proceedings were initiated in 2014 by a journalist representing the beneficiaries of Randy Wolfe, leader of the Spirit group. The guitarist, who composed Taurus , had never sued before his drowning death in 1997.

However, he has long maintained with his relatives and in certain press articles that he deserves writing credit for Stairway to Heaven , calling the song “theft”.