Zeppelin wins battle of the bands in `Stairway' fight

A federal appeals court on March 10 restored a jury verdict that found Led Zeppelin did not steal "Stairway to Heaven."

The 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco handed the major win to guitarist Jimmy Page and singer Robert Plant and dealt a blow to the estate of Randy Wolfe of the band Spirit. The estate claimed that the 1971 mega-hit "Stairway to Heaven violated the copyright of the 1968 song "Taurus."

A majority of an 11-judge panel overturned a previous ruling that the jury in the 2016 trial should have heard the recording of "Taurus" and was given poor instructions before jurors found in favor of Page and Plant.

The composition of the two songs, not their recordings, were at issue in the case, but the plaintiffs had sought to play the two recordings for jurors as part of their argument that Page had access to the song "Taurus" as required to prove a copyright violation.

The attorney for the estate, Francis Malofiy, said that Led Zeppelin prevailed because of technicalities and judges' misunderstanding of copyright law with their insistence that sheet-music transcriptions of the songs filed with the U.S. copyright office were the only relevant material, especially given that neither Page nor Wolfe even read music.

"I have to go to court proving that Jimmy Page copied something that he never saw," said Malofiy, who plans to appeal the decision.

He said it was "ridiculous" that jurors could not simply hear the two songs in dispute, and that if they could the case would be an easy call for the Wolfe estate.

"Its frustrating when justice is the search for the truth and the truth escapes us," Malofiy said.

Representatives for Led Zeppelin declined comment.

The ruling found that because the...