Led Zeppelin and its music labels were the winner of Monday's copyright decision over the song "Stairway to Heaven." The estate of a songwriter that claims the super group copied his work got the short end. But the estate wasn't the only one.

Among the collateral damage from an en banc ruling from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit was a 2002 precedent written by former Chief Judge Alex Kozinski endorsing the so-called inverse-ratio rule. And its a precedent Kozinski has been relying on in his first case back at the court as a private advocate.

M. Margaret McKeown's opinion for a 9-2 en banc court in Skidmore v. Led Zeppelin overruled the court's inverse-ratio rule. She noted that only one other circuit follows the 43-year-old rule while four others have rejected it. 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.