Los Angeles (AFP)
The legendary British rock group Led Zeppelin officially won on Monday the legal battle started six years ago by the beneficiaries of a Californian group who accused him of plagiarism in his planetary hit "Stairway to Heaven", released in 1971.
Last resort of the plaintiffs, the Supreme Court of the United States refused to take up this case, thus making final the previous judgments which considered that Led Zeppelin was indeed the author of this rock classic, which brought in millions of dollars. .
Last March, a San Francisco appeals court upheld a judgment handed down at first instance in Los Angeles in 2016 according to which "Stairway to Heaven" did not copy the instrumental track "Taurus", composed by Spirit, a psychedelic group for years 1960 which never exceeded esteem success.
At the time, the judges ruled that Led Zeppelin singer Robert Plant and guitarist Jimmy Page had had access to Spirit's song.
But the plaintiffs, who claimed between $ 3 million and $ 13 million in copyright, had failed to prove that elements of "Taurus" were "intrinsically similar" to the introduction of "Stairway to Heaven" , over two minutes long.
In 2016, Jimmy Page had said at the bar that the series of agreements at the heart of the plagiarism trial "had always circulated".
In 2018, however, this judgment was quashed during a first appeal procedure, for legal reasons.
The members of Led Zeppelin had therefore requested and obtained a review of this judgment by the San Francisco Court of Appeal.
The civil proceedings were initiated in 2014 by a journalist representing the beneficiaries of Randy Wolfe, leader of the Spirit group.
The guitarist, who composed "Taurus", had never sued before his death by drowning in 1997.
However, he has long maintained with his relatives and in certain press articles that he deserves writing credit for "Stairway to Heaven", calling the song a "flight".
© 2020 AFP