ZEPPELIN FACE NEW LAWSUIT OVER ‘STAIRWAY TO HEAVEN’

Just when Led Zeppelin thought they had successfully defeated a law suit brought against them by the estate of late guitarist Randy California, it has come back to haunt them.

In 2015, the band were sued by Michael Skidmore, who is the trustee for the Spirit guitarist’s songs, claiming they had stolen the guitar riff from the 1968 Spirit song ‘Taurus’ for the opening of ‘Stairway…’ three years later. This case was dismissed a year later. But now an appeals court in San Francisco has overruled that decision, citing a series of errors made by the original judge in the case.

The judge apparently did not inform jurors the trustee could win if the guitarist (pictured above) had written a “sufficiently original combination” of musical elements. He also shouldn’t have told the jurors about the “copyrighting of music elements in the public domain”.

So, now the copyright case will go back to court.

Here’s ‘Taurus’:

And this, of course, is ‘Stairway To Heaven’: