Led Zeppelin trial: Led Zeppelin win copyright wrangle
Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robert Plant did not plagiarise a song by the American band Spirit when they wrote Stairway To Heaven, a jury has found.
The veteran rock stars appeared at a federal court in Los Angeles to deny claims that the guitar intro to the 1971 song was 'lifted' from an instrumental track called Taurus.
A lawsuit was filed by Michael Skidmore, the trustee of Spirit guitarist Randy Wolfe – known as Randy California – who drowned in 1997 having never taken legal action over the song.
After a week-long trial, a jury found Taurus and Stairway To Heaven were not 'extrinsically similar'.
During the trial, guitarist Page said he owned five Spirit albums but he had never watched the band play live and Taurus was 'totally alien' to him. In his evidence, singer Plant, 67, said he had no memory of watching Spirit in Birmingham in 1970, because he was involved in a car crash that night.
