Yes, that descending chord progression is familiar – or, to put it another way, it's Glory Box by Portishead – but theft is only a problem if the result is less than spectacular.
In "Worry Walks Beside Me," over a bluesy, descending chord progression, he wonders, "What will it take to be free again?" And in "Any Day Will Do Fine," he promises God that "I'll be changing my ways".
Matthew Passion," for example, begins with a repeating figure in which ascending melodic leaps and dotted rhythms are set against a descending chord progression to create a tension that magnifies the text.
"Little by Little" has intertwined acoustic guitar picking and a descending chord progression akin to older Radiohead songs like "Reckoner," but even more than its predecessors, it is engulfed in percussion.
Just over 50 years ago a generation of young British musicians, including the members of the Rolling Stones, grappled with the distinctive descending chord progression of Fortune Teller, a rhythm and blues hit written by the New Orleans pianist Allen Toussaint, while memorising its hip, humorous lyric.
The lawsuit accusing Led Zeppelin of taking a descending chord progression in "Stairway" from the instrumental "Taurus" was brought in 2014 by Michael Skidmore, a trustee for the estate of the late Spirit guitarist and songwriter Randy Wolfe.
Many years on, a Los Angeles court has now decided that a jury must rule whether the descending chromatic chord progression with which Page begins the track was lifted from a similar progression on the 1967 track Taurus by the US band Spirit.
Musicologists summoned for the defence said the descending chromatic minor line progression shared by both songs had been a common musical device for centuries.
"While it is true that a descending chromatic four-chord progression is a common convention that abounds in the music industry, the similarities here transcend this core structure," Klausner wrote.
Unable to play recordings of Taurus to the jury, the attorney summoned musicologists who said the instrumental's copyrighted sheet music shared with Stairway a descending A-minor chord progression, notes of the same duration, arpeggios and similar pairs of notes.
