"Stairway To Heaven" Plagarism court case

I was hoping someone would bring this up. Very interesting case, mainly due to the precedents in the Robin Thicke/Marvin Gaye case.

The Stairway guitar intro sure sounds similar to parts of the Spirit song. And, apparently there's a connection between the bands back when the songs were released.

But I'm not a composer nor am I a musician. How come Prince never got sued for "Little Red Corvette" by the writers of "Up The Ladder To The Roof"? The choruses on those songs seemed similar enough to me, especially considering the history between George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord" and "He's So Fine".

Rock and roll trials are great. While new musicians struggle, Led Zeppelin is a huge money-making machine. As a LedZep fan, I want them to prevail. But if they lose and are forced to pay royalties, I will smile and be glad for the estate of Randy California.

The article says Randy California chose not to make a claim.
In this "Spirit", the matter should be dropped.

zep is unquestionably great, but has a long history of putting their names on other folks' tunes (or traditional songs) and, to my knowledge, already paid off for "dazed and confused" and "bring it on home." they also had to change the credit on "baby i'm going to leave you" to the actual writer, anne bredon, some 20 years later. not sure of the legal disposition of "lemon song" or "whole lotta love," but they're straight howling wolf/willie dixon cops. as for the intro to "stairway," i dont doubt that zep heard the spirit song first, but it's much more ambiguous as to whether zep crossed the line from "influence" to outright infringment. it's probably bad policy to draw the line too rigidly--almost everybody borrows elements from other songs, and in this specific case (as oppossed to :my sweet lord") the overall concepts of the songs  were sufficiently different to give this one to zep.

One can’t help wondering why Led Zeppelin never went after the band that recorded the album, Hairway to Steven. Seems like a lawsuit made to order.

The weird thing about the outright Zep rip-offs is that Jimmy Page generally didn't bother to change the lyrics very much. When you borrow the chords and melody, it might be influence, but when you do that to Bert Jansch's Black Water Side and call your song Black Mountain Side, you're kinda begging for the lawsuit.

I don't think that Stairway falls into that category (and - were it up to me - I wouldn't award Spirit/Randy California's estate any money) but Page has poisoned the well so many times that he might lose this one on principle.