Led Zeppelin founders Jimmy Page and Robert Plant lost their bid to avoid a trial that may rewrite the history of rock n’ roll over song-writing credit for the 1971 classic “Stairway To Heaven”, reports Bloomberg.com.

A federal judge in Los Angeles ruled that a jury must decide whether the British rockers ripped off the opening licks of “Taurus”, which was recorded by a band named Spirit that once played concerts with Zeppelin. The judge dismissed some claims in the lawsuit and also said the plaintiff can get only half of any jury award of damages.

The lawsuit was brought in 2014, 43 years after "Stairway To Heaven" was released, on behalf of the late Randy California, Spirit’s guitarist and the composer of “Taurus”. A trust created by his mother and administered by a former rock journalist alleged in the complaint that Page lifted the opening guitar plucks in “Stairway” from an instrumental that California had written in 1966 for his girlfriend. According to trustee Michael Skidmore, Page had asked California to teach him the chords to Taurus in 1969, when the two groups would sometimes tour together.

In February, Page, Plant, Zeppelin bassist John Paul Jones and Warner Music Group Corp. asked US District Judge R. Gary Klausner to throw out Skidmore’s lawsuit, arguing that California was a songwriter for hire who didn’t own the copyright to his composition. Even if he did, they argued, the similarity between "Stairway To Heaven" and "Taurus" was limited to a "descending chromatic scale of pitches" that have been known for centuries and are too commonplace in music to be entitled to copyright protection.

Read the full story at Bloomberg.com.