Was "Stairway to Heaven" a ripoff of the song " Taurus" by Spirit

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17. You're a real piece of work

In the courtroom, the jury was serenaded by all manner of Stairway to Heaven versions, including those played live by the experts on guitar and electric piano, scratchy recordings guitarist Jimmy Page made while assembling the composition 46 years ago, and finally the famous eight-minute album track itself. When the jurors heard Taurus, however, it was only the experts’ versions of the sheet music, because the composition—and not the recording—was at issue in the case.

Until 1978, songwriters could submit only sheet music to copyright a song in the U.S. Since then, they've also been able to submit a sound recording.

For the music business, the stakes seemed high in the Stairway dispute. Just last year, a jury in the same courthouse surprised the industry by awarding $7.4 million (later reduced to about $5.3 million) for the infringement of Marvin Gaye's 1977 Got to Give it Up by Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke with their 2013 hit Blurred Lines. In the Stairway case, the trust of the late Spirit guitarist and Taurus author Randy Wolfe (known as Randy California) was seeking millions of dollars. Any loss for Led Zeppelin could have opened the doors to endless ancient claims tied to old songs. Yet Led Zeppelin's win doesn't necessarily mean the recent uptick in copyright cases will slow—again, because the sheet-music standard generally involves older compositions.

It also doesn't mean the Spirit-Zeppelin battle is over. The lawyer representing the trust, Francis Malofiy, has said that any appeal could include a protest over having been limited to the deposit copy. Among the points he sought to make at trial was that the sheet music is a distant translation of the original guitar composition, and is even written as if for piano. When played in court, the sheet music sounded more like a sibling of the album version, with notes from a harpsichord arrangement mixed in with the guitar tones.

I'm pretty sure that Malofiy has been suspended at being an attorney for a bit over the sleazy crap he pulled.

Until we meet again