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Kozinski Angle In 9th Circuit's Led Zeppelin Ruling
Defendants Led Zeppelin and its music labels were the winners in the copyright decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit over the song "Stairway to Heaven." Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin, 16-56057 (9th Cir. 2020). The estate of songwriter Randy Wolfe (p/k/a California), guitarist for the 1960s rock group Spirit, that claimed the super group copied his work got the short end. But the estate wasn't the only one.
Among the collateral damage from the Ninth Circuit's en banc ruling was a 2002 precedent written by former Chief Judge Alex Kozinski that endorsed the so-called "inverse-ratio" rule. It's a precedent Kozinski has been relying on in his first case back at the Ninth Circuit as a private advocate. The rule says that the more access an alleged infringer has to a copyrighted work, the less proof is needed of substantial similarity by an allegedly infringing work.
Circuit Judge M. Margaret McKeown's opinion for a 9-2 en banc court in Skidmore overruled the court's inverse-ratio rule. She noted that only the Sixth Circuit follows the 43-year-old rule while several others have rejected it.
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