Led Zeppelin have been back in court to protect “Stairway To Heaven” from copyright suits, and according to NBC News, the Justice Department filed a friend of court brief late Thursday against a claim that the band stole the musical passage from an earlier recording, "Taurus", by Spirit. The legal battle of the bands has played out in federal courts in California for the past five years.

In its brief filed Thursday, the Justice Department said the trial judge got it right when he ruled that the only work subject to copyright protection was the sheet music, because the song was written before Congress changed the law in 1972, which gave protection to sound recordings.

Read the complete reprt here.

A federal appeals court agreed Monday, June 10th, to give the defunct rock band a new hearing to defend a jury’s favorable verdict in a suit that claimed the opening lines of the 1972 hit had been plagiarized from a 1968 song by the California band, Spirit.

A 2014 lawsuit alleged that “Stairway To Heaven” songwriters Jimmy Page and Robert Plant had heard “Taurus” at concerts or on recordings and lifted part of it for the Led Zeppelin song. The suit was filed by the estate of Spirit band member and songwriter Randy Wolfe, also known as Randy California, who died in 1997. The estate’s lawyer says any damages in the case would go to a trust fund to buy musical instruments for schoolchildren.

At the trial in 2016, a federal court jury in Los Angeles heard conflicting testimony from musicology experts about whether the passages were similar enough for a copyright violation, and also heard a guitarist play excerpts from the two scores. Jurors then found unanimously that Led Zeppelin had not violated Spirit’s copyright.

Last September, however, a panel of the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ordered a new trial. The court said U.S. District Judge Gary Klausner had wrongly instructed the jury to disregard any similarities between standard musical elements in the two songs, like a rising scale or a chord progression, because they are too common to be copyrighted.

Standard musical elements, when considered together, can be protected from unauthorized duplication when they have undergone changes or “selection and arrangement that may have rendered them original,” Judge Richard Paez said in the 3-0 ruling. He also said Klausner should have allowed a recording of “Taurus” to be played while Page, one of the “Stairway To Heaven” composers, was on the witness stand, which might have helped jurors assess his previous exposure to the song.

But on Monday the full appeals court said a majority of its judges had voted to set the ruling aside and hold a new hearing before an 11-judge panel. The hearing will take place in San Francisco the last week in September.

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