Kraftwerk Lose Hip-Hop Copyright Case

Kraftwerk have lost a copyright battle in Germany’s highest court over a two-second drum sample, the BBC reports. The ruling gives artists greater freedom to sample small segments of copyrighted music, as well as acknowledging “the essential place that the practice of sampling has in the hip-hop genre,” according to AFP. 

The dispute began almost two decades ago, when Kraftwerk’s Ralf Hütter claimed that Moses Pelham, a hip-hop producer, had infringed Kraftwerk’s intellectual property rights by sampling “Metall auf Metall” (“Metal on Metal”) without permission on Sabrina Setlur’s 1997 song “Nur Mir.” In 2012, Germany’s highest court for non-constitutional legal matters ruled in Kraftwerk’s favor, apparently because Pelham used the sample despite having the means to record the same sounds himself. The defense attorney, Udo Kornmeier, appealed the case to the highest court in Germany, which overturned the previous verdict.

The court argued that composers should be able to create work without financial risks or restrictions. Sampling is therefore allowed, as long as the new work does not directly compete with the sampled work and does not financially harm the patent holders, the court ruled. If there is “negligible” impact on the usage rights of the intellectual property owner, “then artistic freedom overrides the interest of the owner of the copyright,” the court said, according to AFP.

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