Led Zeppelin did not plagiarise their hit Stairway to Heaven, US court rules
Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and Robert Plant have won a plagiarism court case over their hit song Stairway to Heaven.
A jury in Los Angeles have rejected claims that the pair had copied the introduction to the song from a melodic track called Taurus by the US band Spirit.
They found that the riff they were accused of taking from Taurus was not intrinsically similar to the opening chords of Stairway.
The Led Zeppelin musicians had been taken to court for alleged copyright infringement by a trustee of the late guitarist Randy Wolfe, who wrote Taurus around 1967.
Wolfe died in 1997, but his trustee Michael Skidmore brought the civil claim in which he claimed the famous melodic opening to Stairway was "a rip-off".
The court heard that Led Zeppelin had performed alongside Spirit at their first US show on December 1968.
However Plant had told the court he had no recollection of having seen the band and had written the opening chords as an attempt to capture "the beauty and remoteness of pastoral Britain" in testimony to the court.