New plagiarism lawsuit about "Stairway To Heaven"

Randy California, a member of Spirit, a psychedelic rock band from Los Angeles, always pointed out that the riff in the intro of the 1971 rock hit "Stairway To Heaven" by Led Zeppelin has similarities with the band's instrumental piece "Taurus" that he had written in 1966 and released in 1968. But Randy California never had the money to file a lawsuit against Jimmy Page and Robert Plant, the Led Zeppelin members who wrote "Stairway To Heaven". He died in 1997 while swimming in the sea with his son in a rip current after saving his son's life.

Finally Randy California's trustee Michael Skidmore prompted Jimmy Page and Robert Plant before a US district court in 2016. He wants to achieve that Randy California will be credited as one of the authors of "Stairway To Heaven" so that his heirs get some of the royalties. It is estimated that the heirs would get around 40 million US dollars. Although Robert Plant visited a Spirit concert in 1970 on which, he says, he did not listen to the music but was drinking at the bar, the Led Zeppelin members won the lawsuit because the court stated substantial differences between the two songs.

An appeal court in San Francisco just ordered a new trial about this case because the judge in the first court misinformed the jury about the copyright protection of short sequences of tones. Another problem was that the judge did not introduce the original recordings of Spirit and Led Zeppelin but only considered the sheet music which was played anew for the lawsuit.

/TWA

We just want your money – for a good cause!

For COVER.INFO's maintenance you can donate to our non-profit association. Donations can be set off against tax liability in Germany.

COVER.INFO would not exist without a lot of voluntary work. It is not only necessary to maintain the database and fill in new entries. There would be no database if we did not have the inevitable hardware or make the essential administrative and programming works.

The problem

Not only server hosting costs money. When we have no voluntary skillful programmer, we will have huge costs for the further development of COVER.INFO. Luckily we currently have Falko who had the time to develop the new COVER.INFO during the last months. But Falko will have other things to do very soon.

COVER.INFO has to be kept state-of-the-art. Firstly this is important for making the website work on all modern browsers. Secondly this is necessary for IT-security reasons. As long as we have to fall back on external technical personnel, this will cause high costs.

Furthermore the website should not stay as it is now. New functions shall be developed to make it even more useful and easy to use.

The association

Thus on June 1, we founded a non registered association called COVER.INFO n. e. V. which is now operating the website COVER.INFO. Its benefit for the public has already been recognized by the local tax authority. Thus donations to the association can be set off against income and corporate tax liability in Germany. The association is authorized to issue donation receipts.

This way, the association can collect tax-advantaged money to maintain COVER.INFO in order to altruistically serve the advancement of people education in popular music. More about the association and its statues can be found here.

Donations

If you want to financially support COVER.INFO, you can send us money via bank transfer or PayPal. All required information can be found on this page. We hope that you also think our database is supportable.

Back to the roots: the extended artist view

Many users wished to have the old version of COVER.INFO with its tables back. They liked it because you could see on one single page which originals an artist has covered or which performers covered which songs of an artist. The new COVER.INFO with its song related views does not directly show such information.

That is why we reintroduce an artist-related table view which we would like to test with you. Click on the table symbol which you find on artist pages except in the mobile version.

Now you see a table view with the initial songs (originals) on the left and the follow-up songs (cover versions, samples, medleys, musical quotations) on the right. This is inverted compared to the old coverinfo.de in order to keep the representation chronological.

You can sort the columns of the table in ascending and descending order. Artists and titles can be clicked to go to the normal view with further information.

/TWA