My wife was just released from jury duty in a case involving Led Zeppelin.

[brett_jv]

12. The opening chords? That song has like 6 major 'passages' I can think of offhand

And it's like an 8 minute song, part of it's fame derived from it's 'epic' structure, like a bunch of chapters of a book.

There is no WAY you could convince me it's plagiarized based on similarity of the first set of chords, even if they were the same chords and played the same way. THat's like 1/10 of the song, and there's not even vocals in it. I don't think anyone can claim ownership of a chord progression, pretty sure there has to be lyrics involved as well.

That said Zep has been gouged for $$$ for plagiarism in the past, such as by Willie Dixon and I think by either Muddy, or Howlin' Wolf I forget which, maybe 1 or 2 others. They did rip lots of small pieces of old blues and early rock songs and put their lyrics into stuff on Zep I & II, primarily.

Some of them did have some merit, such as the claim that "whole lotta love" plagiarized "you need love" ... there's a clear lifting of lyrics involved in these ... but to not my knowledge they're not even sung over the same chords. IOW 'chords' is a LOT harder to prove plagiarism with.