In closing arguments on Wednesday, Skidmore’s attorney Francis Malofiy argued that Wolfe, who drowned in 1997, is owed a writing credit and that the trust set up in his name should receive millions of dollars in damages. “This case is about copying”.
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“Give credit where credit is due”.
He told the jury the descending chromatic scale played by Page in the first moments of “Stairway” was a musical device so common and unoriginal that “it belongs to everyone”.
Although the attorney for Spirit tried his hardest to get them to admit it, both Plant and Page stood firm that they did not recall hearing the band perform, or a rendition of “Taurus”. He continued to emphasize the legally questionable “Jimi Hendrix defense”, going on about Wolfe’s early association with the guitar god.
He also repeated the absurd assertion that Jimmy Page’s ability to write original songs was compromised by his time as a session musician “playing others’ music”. Malofiy seemed to approach the case on a pass/fail basis: In his rebuttal to the defense, he reminded the jury members that he only needed to prove his case by “51 percent” – sticking his arms out and tilting his body as if he’d become the personification of the scales of justice himself.
During Malofiy’s brief rebuttal, he told jurors Anderson was trying to trick them and “it’s not a coincidence” that the two songs contain similar chord progressions.
He pointed to what he said were gaping holes in the case, including the claim that a music company, not Wolfe, owned the copyright to “Taurus”.
Attorneys for the estate of the late Randy Wolfe, founder of Spirit, claim the riff was taken from the 1968 song “Taurus”.
Led Zeppelin lawyer Peter Anderson says any copyright lawsuit should have been brought back when “Stairway to Heaven” came out in 1971. Malofiy also said the band changed its long-held story about Page and Plant coming up with the chords and first lyrics for “Stairway” at a cottage in Wales to minimize any resemblance to “Taurus”.
Malofiy struggled with a hard legal obstacle throughout the trial: U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner ruled the jury would not hear “Taurus” the way Spirit performed and recorded it. Instead, sticking to well-established copyright law, the judge ruled the only version of the song in question was the sheet music submitted to the U.S. Copyright Office. Anderson also stressed that whether or not the signature “Stairway” intro was created during Page and Plant’s stay at Bron-Yr-Aur was a “red herring”.
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The eight jurors will need to decide whether Page and Plant had access to “Taurus” and whether there’s any substantial similarities between unique elements of the Spirit composition and “Stairway”. Anderson said. “They should have sued in 1972”.
