Kraftwerk have lost a two-decade dispute over the use of a two-second sample from a song of theirs by a hip-hop artist.
Ralf Hutter sued Moses Pelham over the use of a drum pattern from ‘Metall auf Metall’, taken from 1977 album Trans-Europe Express, which Pelham used in a 1997 song by Sabrina Setlur called ‘Nur Mir’.
As the BBC reports, the German Constitutional Court ruled in Pelham’s favour though deciding that the impact of the sample’s use on Kraftwerk did not outweigh “artistic freedom”. Germany’s Federal Court of Justice had previously sided with Hutter in 2012 agreeing that the use of the sample did amount to copyright infringement.
