Led Zep to face copyright trial over Stairway

hobbio

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-36022876

 

About time.

lloyd

If they lose this, they could get hit for half their back catalogue!

not_the_dj

So it's going to a jury....this could be costly for Mr Page and co.

eSully

And here's the song in question which it's claimed Page stole from:

Starts about 48 seconds in

ICBM

lloyd said:

If they lose this, they could get hit for half their back catalogue!

Not as much as that, surely.

At least three-quarters .

I love Zeppelin, but the quote that 'talent borrows, but genius steals' has never been more accurately applied than to Jimmy Page...

eSully

Yes, there are similarities but it's not quiet the same riff. If Spirit and their lawyers won the case there'll be a copyright shitstorm, it's not hard to find songs with similar if not identical riffs across all genres of music.

Fretwired

It's a fairly generic simple descending chromatic pattern .. Stairway is different enough .. this sort of thing is bad for music. Nobody owns a simple picked guitar pattern. Spirit should take a more sensible view like Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson did with the Eagles Hotel California.

Sambostar

So the first four chord progressions are the same, that's it.  Big deal.

Are Ratt about to sue GN'R for ripping Nightrain from Back for More, or Sweet Child from Scene of the Crime?

eSully

Exactly, the songs, when taken as a whole song, are very different, the riffs have similarities but aren't the exact same riff. I'd be very surprised if Spirit get anything out of this case.

xSkarloey

lloyd;1034536" said:

If they lose this, then almost every writer of music ever could get hit for half their back catalogue!

I think we should turn this into a 'this sounds very much like that' thread.

We'll be hear for eternity, but it is such fun.

I think this case depends on what is being alleged, because if you stripped both tracks of their existing arrangements and played them in a court room on a piano, then I'm sure as many differences than similarities are apparent.

What I think is that at best it's a case of 'inspired by' or 'got the general notion for song a from song b'. However proving even that would be very hard. IMO none of this is so clear cut as other such cases in music history.




















Such as ....( edited should any lawyers be reading).

ICBM

Joking aside - I do think it's likely that Page was inspired by it, if he heard Spirit playing it when they supported Zeppelin*. But that's not quite the same as saying as he copied it. It is based around a fairly standard chord progression and picking pattern, so it's not that surprising they should sound similar.

There is a vast amount of music which is written because someone was inspired by some aspect of something they heard, but created something new from it rather than copying the original wholesale. It's where you draw the line that makes it a legal matter…

If I had to put money on it I would say Page will get away with it.

(*Some of it may revolve around this - another famous one is the Jethro Tull/Hotel California claim… except that Don Felder, who wrote the music for Hotel California, was not even in the Eagles when Tull toured with them.)

boogieman

It's only the descending riff that's the same. And why has it taken over 40 years to sue?

xSkarloey

Honestly, if this case wins I shall change my name to 'Trad Arr' and absolutely clean up.

english_bob

Surely the first question to be asked is "have you not heard Stairway to Heaven in the last 45 years then?" 

The guy who wrote the Spirit song has been dead since 1997 too- whoever profits from this case will not be the guy whose work was "borrowed".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randy_California

lloyd

To be honest, how many combinations of chords/notes that sound 'good' to our western ears can there be? 

How many times do you sit down to write a song and realise it's already been written? I wrote (I can't get no) satisfaction by the Rolling Stones the other week for example....

I'm not a fan of these law-suits for plagiarism as it's so subjective. Where do you draw the line? Who gets the rights for I - V - vi - IV? Or 12 bar blues progression?

english_bob

Fretwired said:

Spirit should take a more sensible view like Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson did with the Eagles Hotel California.

Which, for the uninitiated (which was me until a couple of minutes ago), is this:

Songfacts: Your song "We Used To Know" is certainly an influence on "Hotel California." Can you talk about that?

Ian: It was a piece of music that we were playing around the time… I believe it was late '71, maybe early '72 when we were on tour and we had a support band who had been signed up for the tour, and subsequently, before the tour began, had a hit single. The song, I believe, called "Take It Easy." And they were indeed the Eagles. We didn't interact with them very much because they were countrified laid back polite rock, and we were a bit wacky and English and doing weird stuff. And I don't think they liked us, and we didn't much like them. There was no communication, really, at all. Just a polite observance of each other's space when it came to sound checks and show time. But they probably heard us play the song, because that would have featured in the sets back then, and maybe it was just something they kind of picked up on subconsciously, and introduced that chord sequence into their famous song "Hotel California" sometime later. But, you know, it's not plagiarism. It's just the same chord sequence. It's in a different time signature, different key, different context. And it's a very, very fine song that they wrote, so I can't feel anything other than a sense of happiness for their sake. And I feel flattered that they came across that chord sequence. But it's difficult to find a chord sequence that hasn't been used, and hasn't been the focus of lots of pieces of music. It's harmonic progression is almost a mathematical certainty you're gonna crop up with the same thing sooner or later if you sit strumming a few chords on a guitar.

There's certainly no bitterness or any sense of plagiarism attached to my view on it, although I do sometimes allude, in a joking way, to accepting it as a kind of tribute. It's a bit like this tribute Rolex that I'm wearing.

(in an interview with Songfacts here)

RocknRollDave

lloyd said:

If they lose this, they could get hit for half their back catalogue!

Already been done and settled out of court.

According to Wikipedia:

• On Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin II (1969), parts of the song "Bring It On Home" were copied from Sonny Boy Williamson's 1963 recording of "Bring It On Home," written by Willie Dixon. On the same album, "The Lemon Song" included an adaptation of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor." In 1972, Arc Music, the publishing arm of Chess Records, brought a lawsuit against Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement over "Bring It On Home" and "The Lemon Song"; the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
• Led Zeppelin's song "Whole Lotta Love" contained lyrics that were derivative of Willie Dixon's 1962 song "You Need Love." In 1985, Dixon filed a copyright infringement suit, resulting in an out-of-court settlement. Later pressings of Led Zeppelin II credit Dixon as co-writer.^[24]
• Led Zeppelin also paid a settlement to the publisher of Ritchie Valens' song "Ooh! My Head" over "Boogie with Stu" (from their album Physical Graffiti) which borrowed heavily from Valens' song.^[25]

Fretwired

@english_bob .. listen to a mash-up ..

RocknRollDave

Skarloey said:

Honestly, if this case wins I shall change my name to 'Trad Arr' and absolutely clean up.

I thought about using Les Beat as my nom-de-plume, so that when my albums are in the rack in alphabetical order they are listed as "Beat, Les"....and I may at least gain a few sales down to short-sghtedness....

ICBM

english_bob said:

Fretwired said:

Spirit should take a more sensible view like Jethro Tull's Ian Anderson did with the Eagles Hotel California.

Which, for the uninitiated (which was me until a couple of minutes ago), is this:

[Songfacts]

This is wrong though - because Felder was not in the Eagles until much later than that tour, so couldn't possibly have heard Tull playing it then. He claims to have derived it from a traditional Spanish or Mexican piece, if I remember rightly - Henley and Frey then wrote the words, which are completely unrelated to We Used To Know.

So even though Anderson is right, he doesn't need to be .

english_bob

RocknRollDave said:

According to Wikipedia:

• On Led Zeppelin's album Led Zeppelin II (1969), parts of the song "Bring It On Home" were copied from Sonny Boy Williamson's 1963 recording of "Bring It On Home," written by Willie Dixon. On the same album, "The Lemon Song" included an adaptation of Howlin' Wolf's "Killing Floor." In 1972, Arc Music, the publishing arm of Chess Records, brought a lawsuit against Led Zeppelin for copyright infringement over "Bring It On Home" and "The Lemon Song"; the case was settled out of court for an undisclosed sum.
• Led Zeppelin's song "Whole Lotta Love" contained lyrics that were derivative of Willie Dixon's 1962 song "You Need Love." In 1985, Dixon filed a copyright infringement suit, resulting in an out-of-court settlement. Later pressings of Led Zeppelin II credit Dixon as co-writer.^[24]

What's interesting is that Willie Dixon- who an in-house songwriter for Chess records- was not above borrowing from other artists or "traditional" blues tunes and slapping his name on the credits as a songwriter. Where does it end?