Common law creates interesting precedents, and solicitors always ensure that they are mindful of changes to legislation that can affect family court decisions, divorce proceedings and property law activities such as conveyancing and ensuring ownership.

This is why legal cases featuring some of the most famous musical groups and artists in history can inadvertently set legal precedents elsewhere, such is the case for a legal dispute involving arguably the most famous English rock song ever made.

Led Zeppelin’s Stairway to Heaven, from their technically untitled fourth album in 1971, is amongst the most played songs in the history of rock music, but a dispute regarding its ownership threatened to send shockwaves throughout intellectual property and copyright law.

Stairway To Taurus

As a proto-rock band heavily inspired by blues and folk music, Led Zeppelin were rather infamous for borrowing riffs or entire songs from other musicians, with dozens of comparisons made between their songs and a range of songs they probably knew about.

Songs like Babe I’m Gonna Leave You and Dazed And Confused led to legal settlements and payments of back royalties, whilst others went unchallenged or were deemed to be based on traditional melodies.

However, Stairway to Heaven was for a long time believed to sound somewhat similar to the much shorter 1969 instrumental song Taurus from the American rock band Spirit.

Specifically, the opening guitar arpeggio melody of Stairway to Heaven sounded remarkably similar to Taurus’ primary guitar riff, to the point that Spirit guitarist Randy California said that it sounded “exactly like” their song in 1997.

In 2014, when they realised that they could still file a legal dispute, they did.

The Tune Will Come To You At Last

A complication in musical plagiarism and intellectual property cases is proving that a work is similar in ways beyond those that are common musical elements and that a work steals elements protectable by copyright law.

In this particular case, the law needed to prove both of these statements to be true:

• A work was outright copied.
• A work was substantially similar to the work they copied.

Generally, this proves if a defendant has access to a work and the works are sufficiently similar, with more access requiring less proof of similarity.

One unique aspect of copyright law for music is that it is based on sheet music rather than original recordings, and after an expert performed both songs in court, the jury ruled that the songs were not “intrinsically similar”.

The ruling was granted appeal due to multiple errors regarding originality of combining elements of music otherwise in the public domain. However, this was overturned again by a 9-2 verdict on appeal and following a refusal by the Supreme Court to hear the case, the decision stood.

What Does This Mean For Property Law?

What it proves was that the test for confirming whether an artist stole from another is complex, particularly given Led Zeppelin’s later reputation for borrowing heavily from the classics.

It also changed the rule surrounding “inverse ratio infringement”, where the burden of proof lowers depending on how much exposure the defendant had to the original song.

It also led to questions about how older copyright disputes should be solved, as copyrighted music before 1976 only protected the sheet music and not the recording itself, which could have led to a very different result.