Forbes defends Zeppelin's Stairway rights

[dimestoreguru]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/robasghar/2014/06/25/stairway-to-litigation-led-zeppelin-apple-and-the-curse-of-the-copyright-wars/

Theft By Led Zeppelin And Apple? No, Just Innovation

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A few years ago, Jethro Tull front-man Ian Anderson acknowledgedthat his band and the Eagles had toured together in the early 1970s, and that it may be no coincidence that the Eagles’ “Hotel California” bore a resemblance to his band’s song “We Used to Know.”

Discussing the similarities between his forgotten song and the Eagles’ mega-selling song, Andersen showed great restraint and serenity:

"[M]aybe it was just something they kind of picked up on subconsciously, and introduced that chord sequence into their famous song “Hotel California” sometime later. But, you know, it’s not plagiarism … And I feel flattered that they came across that chord sequence. But it’s difficult to find a chord sequence that hasn’t been used, and hasn’t been the focus of lots of pieces of music. It’s harmonic progression is almost a mathematical certainty you’re gonna crop up with the same thing sooner or later if you sit strumming a few chords on a guitar.

Contrast that with the recent hubbub surrounding the attempts launched a few weeks ago by the late Randy California’s estate to cash in on a similar situation. More than four decades after the release of Led Zeppelin’s rock anthem, “Stairway to Heaven,” California’s estate seeks money and attention for a certain superficial resemblance of chord progressions between “Stairway” and an earlier song, “Taurus,” by California’s former group Spirit.

But is this creative theft? And even if it may constitute theft in some sense of the word, is it something that needs to be redressed? It seems highly doubtful. Such “theft” is the lifeblood of most innovation. And the less time we spend listening to the petitions ofpatent trolls, courtroom cloggers and other opportunists, the better off we’ll be in our cultural, economic and technological development.

Apple AAPL -0.19%’s Steve Jobs, one of the best of our generation at taking existing ideas and reworking them into something distinctive and new, in 1996 quipped: “Picasso had a saying — ‘good artists copy; great artists steal’–and we have always been shameless about stealing great ideas.”

Welcome to the world of Led Zeppelin. And Shakespeare. And many others, for that matter. If William Shakespeare were plying his trade today, his creative output would be slowed, because he’d be trapped in court defending himself against the estates of Saxo Grammaticus, Arthur Brooke, Raphael Holinshed and others, for “stealing” the basis for Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Macbeth and many other works.

Led Zeppelin has been also accused of “stealing” from various old American blues artists. This is a tricky business, because as Led Zeppelin front-man Robert Plant has often noted, all blues artists took and re-appropriated works from one another. Author Willa Cather once said that there are only three or four human stories, and they go on repeating themselves viciously, as if they’d never happened before. In that spirit, there may be only one or two blues songs, which are endlessly repeated, with key improvisations which become the distinctive signature of each succeeding artist. In short, blues is open source. And so is much of rock and roll and popular culture, as Jethro Tull’s Anderson noted.

The moral aspects of intellectual property and intellectual theft—whether in music or technology—can’t be understood outside the context of dollar signs. When millions of dollars aren’t at stake, most reasonable folks are willing to admit that ideas get lifted and refined constantly. But once the price tag gets high enough, everyone becomes a jealous litigator, claiming to have been the first person to copyright fire or the wheel or the touch-pad screen.

In a recent CNET interview, Apple exec Phil Schiller tried to reconcile Jobs’ freewheeling notion of creative theft with Apple’s jealous defense of its intellectual property: “I think what he meant by ‘steal’ was you learn, as artists have, from past masters; you figure out what you like about it and what you want to incorporate into your idea, and you take it further and do something new with it. I can see why people might confuse that with the current use people have for that phrase. You don’t just say, ‘I want something that looks just like yours and I’m going to sell it too.’”

Yes, one could argue that Google GOOGL -0.62%’s Android is simply a “copy” of the Apple mobile operating system. One could argue that Android became the alternative for people who wanted the iPhone experience with the actual iPhone.

Yet Apple has wisely deescalated its patent wars with Google and other competitors. Far better to create new products than defend old ones. Its past litigation has benefited members of the legal profession far more than it’s benefited the company or consumers.

But no fans of Zeppelin would have found earlier works by Spirit or Willie Dixon to be appealingly adequate original versions that Zeppelin merely mimicked. Those earlier songs, along with many other songs and genres that the band radically reworked, are of no commercial value in the estimation of the consuming public.

I’ve argued since the heyday of Napster that we all need to respect the dance of Shiva, the legendary god of destruction and creative renewal. Certain commercial forces (such as widely distributed recordings) that created great wealth for some artists would inevitably be destroyed through Shiva’s endless dance, as subsequent technologies would make it impossible to protect various artists’ ideas. In one moment this helped Led Zeppelin become rich; in our new moment it has helped hip-hop artists to benefit even more from sampling Led Zeppelin tracks than Led Zeppelin benefited from sampling the blues. So it goes with Shiva.

Let Shiva be Shiva, and let innovation happen. Let “Taurus” belong to Spirit, Let “Stairway to Heaven” belong to Zeppelin, let iOS belong to Apple and Android belong to Google, and let all brilliant so-called thieves be liberated to take ideas that exist in the ether and rework them into something new and amazing. It’s what Zeppelin did and what Steve Jobs did. It’s what innovation is all about.

[mack]

Bravo!

I absolutely agree with the assertion of commercial value as a valid point.

How many people, after hearing of this lawsuit, had to seek out "Taurus" in order to even begin to make a comparison?

I'm sure there are not a lot of people who find themselves with that song stuck in their heads......

[Walter]

Nice article!

Thanks for posting it.

[FunkyPhantom]

Great article. thanks for posting!

[Strider]

This is the second or third article that Forbes has published recently about the Stairway lawsuit that truly shows intelligence and a sense of context, legal and otherwise, and doesn't just regurgitate the same old hack innuendos and misconceptions and inaccuracies that most of the other media outlets have relied upon. Well done Forbes, and thanks for posting it here, dimestoreguru.

[ANONYMOUS]

This is the second or third article that Forbes has published recently about the Stairway lawsuit that truly shows intelligence and a sense of context, legal and otherwise, and doesn't just regurgitate the same old hack innuendos and misconceptions and inaccuracies that most of the other media outlets have relied upon. Well done Forbes, and thanks for posting it here, dimestoreguru.

Yes, agreed. Thanks for posting, dimestoreguru!

[mstork]

Finally, someone in the media got it right. Hats off to Forbes...

[Rock Historian]

A decent ear, basic understanding of music (and it's origins), and some common sense - that's all you need to put this to rest.

I commend this man on his efffort to make sense to those who have no clue or, are easily "led" away from the truth.