very indepth article:
http://www.businessweek.com/articles/20 ... -reckoning

Now the late California’s allegation may get its day in court. Andes and the trust that handles California’s royalties say they’re teaming up to seek credit for Stairway. They’re working with Francis Alexander Malofiy, a Philadelphia lawyer whose cases include a pending suit against the singer Usher over the writing credit for the song Bad Girl, which Usher is fighting. Starting in June, Led Zeppelin is preparing to cash in anew on Stairway and other hits by releasing all its albums in deluxe, remastered vinyl and CD editions. Malofiy says he is going to file a copyright infringement lawsuit and seek an injunction to block the rerelease of the album containing the song

Every note in the world has been played before. The main similarities are the sound of the instrument itself, not necessarily the melody. I'll bet there are other songs that sound closer to Stairway than Taurus. Is there a statute of limitations on things like this or do they get beyond that since the album is being reissued?

If this were the old days, Peter Grant would have beat the crap out of them and that would be the end of it. Lawsuit over.

"Malofiy says he is going to file a copyright infringement lawsuit and seek an injunction to block the rerelease of the album containing the song." Malofy is asking to have his house firebombed by some Zep fan. He can seek money damages all he wants but trying to block a release is asking for it....

Any copyright/legal experts here? Can such a lawsuit proceed 43 years after the fact?

According to the article, they have a definite chance at a legal claim.

I'm a HUGE Spirit fan, but I just don't hear that much similarity.

Mind you, the estate of just about every Chicago blues musician should sue Zep, but Spirit??

OK, you all got my curiosity up. I just went & played Taurus. There is a section where there are 5 chords in a row that have SIMILAR intervals as the beginning of Stairway. That is than followed in Taurus by what I'd call a Sailor's Hornpipe!

One could say there is SOME similarity. There is.

IMO, there is more similarity between Pachelbel's Canon In D & Free Bird; & between King Oliver's Muskrat Ramble & Country Joe's Fixin' To Die Rag then there is between Taurus & Stairway. And Country Joe won his case; imo MR & Fixin' are the same song with different instruments & 1 has lyrics & one doesn't. Otherwise identical imo.

It is absolutely ridiculous to wait this long to file a lawsuit, long after the original songwriter has died and would benefit from any settlement. I'm well aware of Page & Plant's habit of ripping off blues artists (as late as the Presence album in 1976, when the Blind Willie Johnson song "Nobody's Fault But Mine" was released with Page/Plant songwriting credits) but trying to delay the release of a reissue eagerly anticipated by millions of fans to pursue some half-ass legal claim 46 years after the fact is a load of crap. As Geff notes, the similarity is minor at best.

Heart fired Andes awhile back. He's probably broke.

if everybody that jimmy page ever ripped a riff from sued him, he would have to actually sit down and write something new so he could make some money again to pay them all off.

i don't have a problem with copping a riff here and there, but taking writing credit for it is just a bit over the top, and page/plant did it on a regular basis.

I think this is a travesty. So was the lawsuit against George Harrison for My Sweet Lord. A five-chord pattern? Really? Somebody claims they own that? The success of Stairway To Heaven is not a result of those guitar chords. The success of My Sweet Lord was not from that three-note pattern. If the whole song was more or less stolen, that's a different story, but that's not the case here. Page took a little pattern from the Spirit song and used it to create something else. Page and Harrison get sued for this kind of thing only because they have lots of money. It's not right.

I read the Harrison suit was that "My Sweet Lord" shared the same notes as "He's So Fine." Three notes or something like that. Incredible.

It would be somewhat understandable if Spirit sued in 1971 but it's just silly to have waited this long.

On another note, it'd be interesting to compile a list of Zep songs that aren't thought to have been derived from other songs. I wonder which list is shorter.

I seem to remember Jimmy Page objecting to Pearl Jam's "Given to Fly" which he (and others) felt was a ripoff of "Going to California". I can't find that story (specifically Page's comments) now so my memory could be wrong. As for GtF's similarity to GtC, I don't really hear it. To me, GtF reminds me more of Tori Amos's "Silent All These Years".

if i recall correctly there are 2 or 3 videos on youtube that chronicle the page "thefts" quite thoroughly.

Yeah, interestingly a Google search for "songs Led Zeppelin didn't rip off" yields results that list the opposite. I guess no one wants to accentuate the positive

Part 3 no longer has audio......copyright infringement.......Jimmy Page must've found out about it.

Thanks for posting those, Charles.

As for the suit, after reading the article, it seems what the surviving members of Spirit want most is a writing credit for Randy California and I think that would be fair. I don't think it's really much of a ripoff there, to be honest, but I think there's enough to deserve a credit. The authors of the original songs shouldn't have had to fight to be credited. It's just a damned shame, for instance, that Keith Relf doesn't have a credit for "Tangerine".

Perhaps even later than that. I'm not going to make a strong case for it (and I don't want to use the term "ripping off" too freely either), but "Fool in the Rain" shows some similarities in structure to Ritchie Valens' "La Bamba"

VIA RS Online:

Judge Calls Led Zeppelin Lawsuit Lawyer 'Unprofessional, Offensive'
Behavior occurred while bringing copyright infringement lawsuit against Usher

By MIRIAM COLEMAN
MAY 24, 2014 3:34 PM ET
A Pennsylvania federal judge has ordered sanctions against the attorney preparing to sue Led Zeppelin for "Stairway to Heaven," claiming that the lawyer behaved "in a flagrantly unprofessional and offensive manner" over the course of a different case. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Francis Malofiy recently attracted the judge's consternation while bringing a lawsuit against Usher and 19 other defendants for copyright infringement.

Malofy represented a songwriter named Dan Marino, who claimed that he had created the basic melody, chord progressions and tempo for the Usher song "Bad Girl" while working with his former songwriting partners William Guice and Dante Barton, who were also named in the suit. According to Judge Paul Diamond's sanctions memorandum, Malofiy misled Guice into believing that he was only a witness in the suit rather than a defendant, and persuaded Guice to sign an affidavit admitting to elements of the Plaintiff's complaint without representation from a lawyer. "Malofiy's discussions with Guice are the paradigm of bad faith and intentional misconduct," Judge Diamond wrote, and later concluded, "Defendants have shown clearly and convincingly that Attorney Francis Malofiy has acted disgracefully: lying to an unsophisticated, impoverished, unrepresented Defendant, thus convincing that Defendant to expose himself (probably baselessly) to substantial liability."

Moreover, the judge says that Malofiy made "sexist, abusive" remarks during the case, including telling the other lawyer, "Don’t be a girl about this." He also reportedly declared that "Usher has $130 million … I'm going to take every penny of it," and told someone else involved in the case, "You're like a little kid with your little mouth." As to the copyright infringement lawsuit, the judge did not find that Usher or his fellow defendants acted improperly.

In a press release, Malofiy objected to the judge's conclusions and stated that he was "upfront and honest with Mr. Guice."

In the meantime, Malofiy has claimed that Led Zeppelin stole the intro for their 1971 song "Stairway to Heaven" from Spirit's 1968 track "Taurus." Malofiy said that he will file a copyright infringement lawsuit and seek an injunction to block the release of the Led Zeppelin IV reissue, according to Bloomberg Businessweek. The recent sanctions against Malofiy could distract from that pursuit, however. "Whether Malofiy should be removed from practice is a question properly answered in another forum," Judge Diamond wrote.

Peter Grant would have just bitch-slapped these people around and the lawsuit would be over by now.

Lawyers...

This may be the first of these Lawsuits against Zeppelin that I didn't agree with.

Though if Page actually heard RC play it first.............. I still hear only a moderate similarity.