61Bloomberg Businessweek June 24, 2019
It turned out I couldn’t use the Stairway intro, because
even though it had been missing from the brief, “unpub-
lished” deposit copy that Page had examined on the stand,
I’d found that fingerpicked portion in the longer, subsequent
“first” deposit of published sheet music. Both versions, how-
ever, lacked the electric guitar solo from the end of the song.
Because the 1909 law says initial deposits need to be “com-
plete copies,” I would take the solo as my own. In fact, as far
as I could tell, the solo wasn’t in any of the 14 versions regis-
tered over the decades.
Purple Haze by Jimi Hendrix was a close call. Neither of
the first two registered versions from 1967 had Hendrix’s
instantly recognizable ascending and descending riff played
at the start and midpoint of the song. But a version registered
in 1980 from a book of tablature for guitarists appeared to
close the loop, so that was out. The Rolling Stones’ Sympathy
for the Devil was also out. Even though the original 1968
deposit copy lacks Keith Richards’s solo, the song’s pub-
lishing company, Abkco Music & Records Inc., submitted
the record itself to the Copyright Office as a published ver-
sion of the song after the new law went into effect in 1978, a
Led Zeppelin
Stairway to Heaven
Guitarsolos
5:55–6:05,6:15–6:26Eagles
Hotel California
Gu los
4:19–4:32 5:31–5:50Bruce Springsteen
Born to Run
The bits the author selected from to assemble his song. Listen at Bloomberg
.com, then build your own using these riffs and others.
Saxsolo
1:52–2:08Glockenspiel
0:28–0:35Intro
0:02–0:14
TheDoors
RidersontheStorm
Bass
0:20–0:24Electricorgan
0:24–0:43,1:13–1:17lGit lliLynyrd Skynyrd
Free Bird
Slide guitar
0:34–0:51Guitar solo
4:54–5:01presumed bulletproofing from which others should learn.
That left rich, usable material from the Eagles, Springsteen,
Lynyrd Skynyrd, and the Doors. My new song was called Free
Hotel Riders on the Stairway to Run.
The two key ingredients: the solos I’d identified as being at
risk and humor (because I didn’t want to come off as an actual
thief ). In a first attempt, I recorded the solos on kazoo, then lay-
ered them over generic drum beats on Apple’s GarageBand app.
An unfortunate audience in the office informed me, though,
that no recognizable tunes were discernible. My guitar-playing
days long behind me, I turned to a sympathetic Bloomberg edi-
tor, Ross Larsen, for help. Ross can play. I stitched his versions
of the solos into a Franken-song with the public-domain back-
ing tracks on GarageBand. For lyrics, I gathered well-known (but
not copyright-registered) phrases from live recordings and had
a Stephen Hawking voice generator speak them: “Does anyone
remember laughter?” during the Stairway section, “What song
is it you want to hear?” for Free Bird, and Springsteen’s “One,
two, three” countdown just before the Born to Run sax solo,
which in our case Ross played on guitar.
As anticipated, the song isn’t very good, other than my
colleague’s fine guitar work. In the end, I didn’t attempt to
copyright my creation; that seemed a bit much. And I plan to
capitulate instantly to any legal challenges, as a purpose of the
exercise was to preserve these snippets for their rightful owners.
And then it spun out of control, in a good way. The
Bloomberg Businessweek design team thought everyone should
get a chance to make their own completely new and legal com-
position from familiar song orphans. A Washington co-worker
hit the archives again and came up with more at-risk riffs,
from the likes of Donna Summer, Marvin Gaye, Carlos Santana,
and the Five Stairsteps. And we built you a toy—check out the
online version of this story.
This exercise in musical archaeology had a few pur-
poses (other than satisfying curiosity). One, to show how
ill-equipped U.S. copyright law is to govern the business of
creativity. Two, to show what’s at stake with real songs by real
composers if the highest courts define the oldies’ copyright
protection merely by the skimpy sheet music.
What happens next is in the hands of the courts. Malofiy
and the plaintiffs in similar cases are hoping for a compro-
mise whereby the old sheet music is used as a blueprint for
a song and musicologists, who already have a role interpret-
ing deposit copies for juries, can use original recordings to
flesh out the protected material. Such an approach could,
in the long run, be good for Led Zeppelin, too, as the band’s
tear-down of Taurus has exposed how vulnerable its own
legacy is.
Which is why the final minute of testimony in the Stairway
trial three years ago was, in retrospect, the most import-
ant. It was a Tuesday afternoon, and Page was on the stand
being cross-examined by Malofiy, who at that point had run
out of allotted time.
“One last question,” Malofiy asked. “If someone took the
intro to Stairway to Heaven, would you sue?” The judge told
Page he didn’t have to answer. —With John Voskuhl