Taurus (instrumental)

The estate of Randy California, who died in 1997, filed a copyright infringement suit in 2014 seeking a co-writing credit for California on "Stairway to Heaven."^[7][8] In April 2016, California Central District Court Judge Gary Klausner ruled that there were sufficient similarities between the songs to call for Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, credited as co-writers of "Stairway to Heaven", to stand trial by jury for copyright infringement.^[9]

The trial began on June 14, 2016.^[10] On June 15, 2016, Jimmy Page spent hours on the witness stand testifying.^[11] By law, the jury was not allowed to hear original recordings of the songs; instead, they heard an expert perform both songs in court using original sheet music.^[12]

The trial concluded on June 23, 2016, with the jury, after one hour of deliberation, finding that Led Zeppelin was not guilty of copyright infringement,^[13] determining that while Plant and Page had access to "Taurus", the song's riff was not "intrinsically similar" to the opening of "Stairway to Heaven."^[14][15]

The Wolfe estate filed an appeal,^[10] and in September 2018, a three judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit in San Francisco, California, citing a series of errors by the previous case's judge, threw out by a 3–0 ruling the 2016 district court's decision.^[16] According to the appeals court decision, the 2016 trial judge erred in failing to instruct jurors that the trustee could prevail if Wolfe had created a "sufficiently original combination" of "otherwise unprotectable music elements," and also in instructing jurors about the copyrighting of music elements in the public domain.^[16] In March 2020, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals sitting en banc, voted 9 to 2 to let stand the 2016 jury verdict in favor of Led Zeppelin.^[17] In October 2020, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to hear the case, leaving the Ninth Circuit's decision in place and effectively ending the dispute.^[18]

• Listen to "Taurus" on YouTube