Stairway To Heaven - Rip Off?Music

[TenEightyOne]

It's surely one of the most famous guitar riffs of all time and the bane of guitar-shop-sales-staff across Europe and America.

Now the estate of Spirit's Randy Wolfe are claiming that Led Zep actually wrote the track after hearing Spirit's "Taurus", a moody instrumental track that Spirit played on the same bill as Zep on a number of occasions. BBC.

A district Judge has found that;

While it is true that a descending chromatic four-chord progression is a common convention that abounds in the music industry, the similarities here transcend this core structure

Given that there is a strong and evident similarity... why has it taken 40 years for this claim to be made?

Thoughts?

Taurus by Spirit:



Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin:

 

[Touring Mars]

Thoughts?

LZ are notorious for not giving credit to their 'influences', which is a great shame because it makes them look quite bad. Page in particular was an integral part of the UK Blues scene in the 1960's, and as such it is hard to say with any certainty whether he was genuinely lifting stuff from other artists or if everyone was just using variations on a theme, which is basically what Blues music is i.e. alot of Blues riffs/songs/bands/artists sound very like one another. This style of music was pretty commonplace in the psychedelic scene of the late 60's too, and Page himself has said words along the lines of 'it couldn't be copyrighted because it is so cliched' - an interesting comment...

Anyway, there's a much clearer example of Led Zeppelin not crediting others for their 'influence', such as this:





This is one of my favourite tracks from one of my favourite albums, and yes, LZ 'make it their own'. But the fact that Moby Grape and the authors of the song are not even mentioned in the credits is pretty lousy.

 

[tarnheld]

Same with the lyrics of Whole Lotta Love, they are taken from Willie Dixon's 'You Need Love':

The lyrics were adapted (also not crediting Dixon) by the Small Faces:

Those lyrics were taken over by Led Zeppelin:

Dixon sued Led Zeppelin and they settled out of court, his credits are now included, but the Small Faces seem to have fallen under the radar.

 

[Sanji Himura]

There is a reason why Statute of Limitations exists, and this lawsuit should be a prime example as to why it needs to be extended to copyright law. To be honest, Spirit has no business waiting 40+ years to bring this claim forward.