Led Zeppelin‘s ongoing headache regarding their original songwriting authenticity behind the melody of “Stairway To Heaven” will undergo further legal examination in appeals court.
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According to reports that came out late Monday afternoon, the 2016 decision by a federal jury in the state of California which saw the famous rock band acquitted of plagiarism on their 1971 classic will get a second look in appeals court. The initial lawsuit was handed to the three surviving members of Led Zeppelin by Michael Skidmore, a trustee for the estate of former Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe, who claims the band stole a melody from his 1968 instrumental, “Taurus”, to be used as one of the main melodic riffs in “Stairway To Heaven”. All three surviving members of Zeppelin, Robert Plant, Jimmy Page, and John Paul Jones, wound up testifying in the proceedings, with Page even pleading ignorance during the trial.
Last September, a three-judge panel of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals decided that the jury in the 2016 proceedings had been “improperly instructed about unprotectable music elements and originality.” The panel also confirmed that the 2016 jury should have been allowed to hear “Stairway” during the proceedings because it would have been valuable for them to observe Page’s body language reaction while it played. On Monday, members of the appellate court confirmed that a majority of its judges voted to rehear the matter before the entire bench, and oral arguments are now set for the week of September 23rd.
“Respectfully, the decision errs in faulting the district court for omitting a selection-and-arrangement instruction even though plaintiff objected to the district court giving it, and for instructing — correctly — that copyright does not protect public domain elements,” Led Zeppelin’s lawyer Peter Anderson said in a statement of the decision for the suit to head to a court of appeals. “The decision also errs because more probably than not the verdict would have been the same. The errors warrant en banc review because if left uncorrected they allow a jury to find infringement based on very different uses of public domain material and will cause widespread confusion in copyright cases in this Circuit.”
Led Zeppelin had seemed to enjoy putting the matter in the rearview mirror so they could hone their focus on cashing in on their 50th-anniversary celebrations with a variety of projects announced and planned throughout 2019. More recently, Robert Plant also announced the June launch of his own podcast series.
[H/T Pitchfork]
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