A Two-Second Kraftwerk Loop Survived as Pastiche. It Was Still a Sample First.

On 2026-09-03 Germany's Federal Court of Justice ruled that Moses Pelham and Sabrina Setlur's Nur mir can stand as pastiche. The track loops a rhythm sequence of roughly two seconds from Kraftwerk's Metall auf Metall, a 1977 recording, under a song issued on 1997 phonograms. Judgment I ZR 74/22 covers the period from 2021-06-07 onward, the date the German provision it turns on took effect.

The trade write-ups reached for "sampling is legal now." The court's own summary is more careful.

Before pastiche came up at all, the BGH held that the use engaged reproduction and distribution rights. The sample was a sample. Only then was the exception applied, to this use, in this window, under German law carrying an EU concept the Court of Justice of the European Union had already been asked to clarify (C-590/23, 2026-04-14). An exception is something you arrive at after the rights have attached. It is not a rule that stops them attaching.

Two seconds is not a small thing

Anyone who makes records knows the musical version of this argument. A loop, an edit, a bootleg, an homage and a lazy lift are five different objects, and most heads can hear which is which inside a bar. Legal language has been trying to fence off some of them for the length of this dispute, in words nobody writes music in.

A rhythm sequence gets lifted because it is identifiable. That is the entire appeal, and it is the same reason it can be matched and argued over decades later.

Kraftwerk has never been museum glass here. We reviewed Minimum-Maximum in 2005 and covered the 3-D tour when it came back through North America in 2016.

What the ruling reaches is narrow: Germany, EU law, and a statute dated 2021. It says nothing about a US clearance, a label contract, a remix contest, a DJ edit or a commercial sample pack. A dispute running this long ran under earlier rules in its earlier stretches, and those are a separate question.

The habit worth keeping is the one that survives every sample story: a credit line on a release page is a clue, not proof that anything was cleared.