Two seconds of rhythm have now spent nearly three decades moving through German and European courts. The strange part is no longer simply that the sample was so short. It is that the same loop from Kraftwerk’s 1977 track “Metall auf Metall” now carries different legal consequences depending on when it was used.

On September 3, 2026, Germany’s Federal Court of Justice dismissed the plaintiffs’ appeal concerning use since June 7, 2021 of the rhythm sequence sampled for Sabrina Setlur’s 1997 track “Nur mir.” The court upheld the finding that producer Moses Pelham’s use qualifies as a permissible pastiche under the copyright provision that took effect that day. The broader dispute is still not completely finished: constitutional complaint 1 BvR 948/23, covering use from December 22, 2002 through June 6, 2021, remains listed on the Federal Constitutional Court’s current docket.

A Two-Second Rhythm Sequence

Pelham and Martin Haas electronically copied roughly two seconds of a rhythm sequence from “Metall auf Metall,” altered it slightly, and repeated it underneath “Nur mir” as a continuous loop. Those basic facts appear in the Federal Constitutional Court’s account of the case.

The sample itself is almost absurdly small beside the machinery eventually built around it: regional courts, Germany’s highest civil court, the Federal Constitutional Court, the Court of Justice of the European Union, then several trips back through the system. Copyright doctrine changed while the case was still alive.

Six Trips Through Germany’s Highest Civil Court

Hamburg’s courts sided with the plaintiffs in 2004 and 2006. The Federal Court of Justice overturned and remanded in 2008. Hamburg again ruled for the plaintiffs in 2011, and the Federal Court of Justice upheld that result in December 2012. By September 2026, the procedural history included six separate Federal Court of Justice decisions or proceedings in the dispute, including two referrals to the European court.

Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court blew open the earlier result in May 2016. It set aside the 2012 judgment and held that courts assessing sampling had to account seriously for artistic freedom, including whether a use only modestly interfered with the phonogram producer’s economic interests. It did not declare sampling categorically legal. It required the copyright analysis to make room for the constitutional protection of artistic freedom.

Then European law changed the shape of the problem again. In 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union held that taking a recognizable sound sample can implicate the phonogram producer’s reproduction right, while a sample modified so that it is unrecognizable to the ear falls outside that particular infringement. When the Federal Court of Justice applied that guidance in 2020, it remanded the dispute to Hamburg rather than supplying one answer for every year of the sample’s use. The European judgment supplied the rule. The calendar would help determine the result.

One Loop, Three Legal Periods

The easiest way to understand the case now is to stop treating it as one uninterrupted copyright dispute.

For uses before December 22, 2002, the defendants prevailed. For uses from December 22, 2002 through June 6, 2021, Hamburg’s Higher Regional Court found infringement. That middle period is now the subject of constitutional complaint 1 BvR 948/23. Since June 7, 2021, however, German copyright law has expressly permitted uses for caricature, parody, or pastiche under Section 51a.

That last category generated another trip to Luxembourg. In April 2026, the Court of Justice held that pastiche is not a general-purpose escape hatch for copying. The new work must evoke an existing work while remaining noticeably different from it, and the borrowed material must participate in an artistic or creative dialogue recognizable to someone familiar with the source. That dialogue can include imitation, homage, humor, or criticism. Applying that framework to “Nur mir,” the court noted that the rhythm sequence had been moved into another musical genre while remaining recognizable despite changes including reduced tempo and a different metric setting. The April 14, 2026 judgment gave the German court the framework it used in September.

The Federal Court of Justice then left Hamburg’s post-2021 ruling intact. For that legal period, this particular use of the Kraftwerk sample qualifies as pastiche.

Andreas Walter, an attorney for the defendants, put the broader artistic argument more aggressively: “Copyright does not exist to isolate art and shield it from any reference.” That is an advocate’s formulation rather than the rule announced by the court, but it gets at the tension beneath the litigation. Copyright protects recorded works partly by controlling copying. Sampling often makes copying itself part of composition.

The Technique Arrived Before the Law Did

Hip-hop and electronic music did not wait for courts to develop a comfortable theory of sampling. Producers had already spent years treating recorded sound as material: cutting it, pitching it, looping it, stacking it, and dropping fragments of existing records into new contexts. Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court expressly recognized sampling’s importance to musical creation in 2016.

“Metall auf Metall” became unusually durable because the legal system kept having to answer a production question with doctrines built at different moments for different problems. First came German phonogram protections. Then constitutional artistic freedom. Then harmonized European copyright law. Then, in 2021, Germany’s express pastiche provision. In 2026, the European court finally explained what that word means in this setting.

None of that turns sampling into a copyright-free zone. Recognizable borrowing can still infringe, and the European court specifically rejected treating pastiche as a catch-all exception. What the case demonstrates instead is how badly a single yes-or-no description can fit a work that remained commercially available while the governing law kept changing around it.

The September ruling closes the newest chapter. The constitutional complaint leaves the middle chapter open. The earliest period ended differently again.

The audio never changed. The law did.