Rather than go to trial and risk losing a lawsuit potentially worth millions of dollars, the iconic rockers of Led Zeppelin could end a legal battle over their most famous tune for just a buck.
At least, that’s according to the lawyers who filed the high-profile lawsuit that looks to reassign credit for the writing of 1971 song “Stairway to Heaven.” Bloomberg reports that the lawyers representing the trust of the late musician Randy Wolfe (aka Randy California) say they are willing to settle the lawsuit for only $1 despite the fact that the rights to the songs are worth millions of dollars to Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and lead guitarist Jimmy Page, who hold the current writing credits for the famous tune.
Of course, the offer comes with a catch. While Plant and Page would pay only $1 in that scenario, the lawyers also want a “Stairway” writing credit for Wolfe, who wrote the 1968 instrumental song “Taurus” for the band Spirit in 1968 that the lawyers are claiming Led Zeppelin ripped off for the opening of their classic rock ballad.
“It’s always been about credit where credit is due,” Pennsylvania attorney Francis Alexander Malofiy told Bloomberg.
As Bloomberg points out, such a writing credit would likely end up being worth quite a bit of money in future royalties on the song, which is part of a catalog of songs that Page and Plant licensed to a division of the Warner Music Group in 2008 as part of a 10-year, $60 million deal. As part of the lawsuit against the two rockers, Malofiy is claiming that Wolfe’s trust should be entitled to a cut of roughly $40 million from that pact based on a three-year statute of limitations.
Coins2Day reached out to a lawyer for Page and Plant for comment and we will update this article with any response.
The good news for Page and Plant is that their side has already secured some court victories before the start of the copyright trial, which is set to being in Los Angeles federal court May 10. In a series of pre-trial rulings earlier this week, a federal judge decided to exclude various sound recordings of “Taurus” from any trial proceedings due to the fact that only the song’s sheet music was submitted to the Copyright Office in the 1960’s, according to The Hollywood Reporter. As such, the judge also rejected several musicologists as expert witnesses because their reports had relied on the discounted sound recordings.