No Plagious…. Definitive

[nicola]

NO PLAGIOUS…. DEFINITIVE


SPIRIT VS LED ZEPPELIN






Hi friends

a few weeks ago I read this news and I wanted to listen
to Spirit's Taurus for the first time to see if they had
actually copied Stairway to Heaven…. I have to say
that apart from a few notes in the initial part and
a few notes within the song I can't understand why
it took 5 years to establish that Stairway to Heaven
is not plagiarism

The American Ninth Court of Appeals closed the lawsuit
started by journalist Michael Skidmore and the heirs
of Spirit singer Randy Wolfe in 2014 for plagiarism
against Led Zeppelin for their song Stairway to Heaven.
The judges ruled that the led zeppelins did not copy
the Taurus song brought to success by the Spirit in 1968,
that is, two years before the Led Zeppelin song was published.


Here a video of comparison between the two songs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-MBKJDmE-OQ


And the 2 songs by Spirit and Led Zeppelin



Spirit - Taurus

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gFHLO_2_THg




Led Zeppelin - Stairway to Heaven


https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CxfniXCwrJA




GOOD LISTENING

[Aerosol]

The real reason it was dismissed is because the court only allowed a comparison of the sheet music, and not the recordings themselves, since the copyright protections did not apply to the recording at the time Taurus was recorded, only to the sheet music.

So even though you can hear very distinct similarities (at the starts of the songs anyway), the sheet music does not show this up quite so obviously.

It has always been clear to me that Jimmy Page clearly was influenced by Taurus, as it was recorded a few years before Stairway, but certainly it's not plagiarism.

[podakayne]

agreed Aerosol