You're human, barely. I'm a lawyer.

I know a lot about the lawn, various other loyarrings. I'm well-educated, well-first.

It's a thorny legal issue, alright. I'll need to refer to the case of Finders vs. Keepers.

Isn't it true that you have been paid for your testimony? Yes, you gave me a dollar and some candy.

And you have been said, well I told you to say, how can any of us trust you?

How can you be so sure? Because I was saying to myself, where could he be going?

I was saying to myself, where could he be going? Five to seven with that sawdust shotgun.

Welcome to Opening Arguments, a podcast that pairs a comedian with a real-life lawyer.

This podcast is sponsored by the law offices of P. Andrew Torres, LLC for entertainment purposes,

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Don't take legal advice from a podcast. Hello and welcome to Opening Arguments. This is episode 653.

It is. Oh man, Andrew. How's it going? I'm Thomas. I'm the musician of the podcast. That's Andrew. He's the lawyer. How are you doing, Andrew?

I am doing fantastic and I am super excited. Whenever we get a chance to do one of these that combines your interests and background and expertise with my interests and background and expertise, boy, it's just fun. This is going to be another music episode.

Music law. We don't do these enough, although I say that I never want to do it again because what happens is I spend, I don't know, 40 hours obsessing over it in my ADHD brain that goes down 100 different rabbit trails and I don't even know that I wrote it down properly.

So, you know, never mind. Let's never do this again. However, I have a tremendous amount around this and I can't wait to get to it.

As an indication of how long this has been and I do think we need to bring listeners back up to speed. The last time we covered this in depth was episode 369.

Back when we were talking about Led Zeppelin, the lawsuits by the band Taurus over their song Spirit. And this is also an Andrew was wrong. Two years in the making of Andrew was wrong.

Yeah, in that episode 369, the ninth circuit on Bonk, ruled in favor of Led Zeppelin. Yeah. And I opined at the end that I thought this was a case where, you know, got a lot of boomers on the Supreme Court.

You have a split among the circuits. I'm about to explain what that rule is. I thought the Supreme Court would take it up and they declined.

The ninth circuit on Bonk has now ruled has now ruled two years ago as we told you in open it is in episode 369 that Led Zeppelin did not copy Randy California's band Taurus playing their song Spirit when the folks at Led Zeppelin wrote Stairway to Heaven.

So case closed at issue in that case was something called the inverse ratio, which said this the stronger the evidence you have that one party had access to the work that is alleged to have been copyrighted the less compelling the similarities between those two works need to be in order to give rise to an inference of copying.

And you might recall that Randy California's band Taurus was the opening act for Led Zeppelin. So yeah, and by the way, this is a rule of interpretation, right? Like it's not in the statute at all. We're going to talk about specifically with the statute says, which is just kind of bare bones.

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