That video is a very fair summary of the situation.
The video comparison is very good. Excellent in fact.
But getting a jury to understand these musical distinctions is tough. People tend to use their ears. They hear a few chords or notes that match and they jump to the wrong conclusion. Our minds play tricks on us. It’s like seeing familiar objects in those Mars pictures. We do the same with music.
Horse puckey. If separated by years or geography maybe. But they shared the same stage and Taurus got there first.
I expect LZ’s defence will be to find numerous other songs that also use a descending chromatic line and predate the Spirit tune.
They clearly plagiarized the song. This will be yet another case of LZ having to pony up and share credit with artists from whom they stole music. Compare the original versions of LZ’s records with the latest versions and you will see drastic differences in the songwriting credits. That’s because LZ has lost case after case over the years.
I’ve played guitar, mandolin, banjo, and ukulele for forty years; I was a professional musician for eight years; I can still play STH note-for-note: it’s obvious to these ears that this song was plagiarized.
At least this time they didn’t turn a great song into dreck, e.g. “Nobody’s Fault But Mine.”
Now I’m starting to wonder when these six country artists will end up suing each other.
Well the good news is you can pretty much play Taurus as well!
Just to be clear here, Led Zeppelin is not charged with “plagiarism.” They are charged with copyright infringement. Plagiarism is not a legal concept and it is much broader than copyright infringement.
That is very interesting. I didn’t bother looking up the songwriting credits of those six songs. Did any come from the same songwriters? What are the dates of the songs? Did all six come out of the Nashville Country Music factory?
I realize that pop and country music are very formulaic, but those six songs and the mashup sound like most of what passes for country music nowadays.
Heck, the guy linked to in the video above explaining the differences and similarities shows a few songs–including ones that Zep wrote–that predate the Spirit tune.
My thoughts? I have little doubt that Zeppelin got the idea from the Spirit tune, especially as they were touring together. It may very well have even been an unconscious influence – I’ve written songs where years later I hear the same riff on the radio and realize that either I’ve heard the song before and coincidentally ripped it off, or I’ve unconsciously “borrowed” it. And I’ve heard it the other way around, too, with hearing a song years later on the radio that sounded very much like a song me or my musician friends had written, but obviously were just coincidences.
Now, like I said, I don’t think this is a coincidence, but I do think the material is a sufficient reworking of a basic idea (broken chords, descending bassline) that I personally wouldn’t want that to count as copyright infringement. If that’s the metric, I can find hundreds or thousands of songs that share similar features. Where is the line? I mean, the first few notes of the Foo Fighters “The Pretender” sound exactly like Stairway (but not Taurus) before veering off.
This.
I once saw a comedian who used one of those handheld electronic keyboards as a prop in his act. For one of his bits, he would play part of the chord progression at the beginning of STH, and ask people to “name that tune”. Since that progression is present in numerous pop songs, audience members would shout out guesses, all of which he’d say were wrong, ultimately naming a song that no one had guessed. I thought this was a great example of how musicians and songwriters see similarities differently than the general audience does. Since STH is possibly the best known song with that progression, it was always one of the guesses. (Another was “Feelings” by Morris Albert, a song which, were it mine, I would probably let people steal it rather than admit to writing). 
I suspect LZ is facing this in part because they did act like total shits for so long, ripping off old blues musicians. Doesn’t mean they’re guilty here.
An interesting song to look at is “She’s Electric” by Oasis. Practically the whole song resembles other well-known songs. The bridge (“And I want you to know…”) starts out identically to the bridge of “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” (“I don’t know why-y-y-y…”). Further in the bridge (“There’s lots and lots, for us to see”) is identical to the Coca-Cola ad (“I’d like to teach, the world to sing”). And the last two bars are almost the same as the last two bars of “A Little Help From My Friends” (“La-la-la-la-la-la-la-la-la” - hell, they even stole the lyrics! 
). About the only part that I can’t find elsewhere is the verse, which still is based on a very common chord progression (e.g., the chorus of Roy Orbison’s “You Got It”).
So, does “She’s Electric” infringe? Hell no. It’s woven together into an original (and IMO very nice) song in a manner undetectable to the general population.
That’s showbiz.
I’m having a hard time finding it online now … but I thought that Randy California had given an interview in the 1990s that explained that he was aware that Page had lifted a bit from “Taurus”, but that he had essentially absolved Page and wasn’t concerned with pursuing anything legally.
I’m just chiming in to say pulykamell pretty much nails my thoughts on this one. They’re similar, but not close enough for me to see it as copyright infringement.
On a related note, I’m still on the fence when it comes to “Blurred Lines”. They don’t share one note, it’s really a question of whether or not studio production is copyright-able. Studio work is difficult work, but I’m not sure it’s really copyright-able.
OK, found the reference – very shortly before his death, Randy California gave an interview to Listener magazine for their Winter 1997 issue**. I could have sworn the Listener article in full was available online (an excerpt is given at the tribute site randycaliforniaspirit.com), but I am having trouble scaring it up now. However, the pertinent part of the Listener article is quoted at this link:
So … hmmm. Perhaps Randy California wasn’t especially interested in suing Led Zeppelin. But it doesn’t really look like he personally absolved Page, either.
**Jeff McLaughlin, “Spirit’s Still Willing: A Conversation with Randy California,” Listener, Winter 1997, p. 51
Also, you can look up “lament bass”, as well as the chromatic fourth (and also the “descending chromatic tetrachord”) and even pianto for many, many examples going back to even Renaissance music of the basic concept.
For example, here’s a song from 1564 that uses the chromatic descent in a minor key (which happens to be the same key as Stairway, too, A minor.)
I’m a bit unsure what the standard is here. Is it the concept for a song or do they have to use a lot of another songs melody and chords?
I’d agree Taurus must have sparked the idea for Stairway. But is that by itself infringement?
I always felt Led Zeppelin wrote their own song. Stairway isn’t Taurus just changed up. The video linked earlier notes the differences in the melodies. They’re different songs from a similar concept. Zeppelin did a better job writing and structuring their song and thats why its one of the most iconic hits from the sixties. Taurus was released two years earlier and never achieved that level of success. That alone shows how the differences in the songs affects how people reacted to them.
We’ll have to see what comes out at the trial.
In my non-expert opinion I’d say they’re different enough that Zeppelin did not infringe up on Spirit’s work. They’re similar, no doubt, but not exactly the same. I’d be surprised if Zeppelin can’t successfully defend this.
Released 1971. FYI.