What did the court actually decide?
On September 3, 2026, Germany's Bundesgerichtshof (BGH), the country's Federal Court of Justice, rejected an appeal from Kraftwerk founder Ralf Hütter and confirmed that producer Moses Pelham was within his rights to sample a roughly two-second rhythm loop from Kraftwerk's 1977 track "Metall auf Metall" for Sabrina Setlur's 1997 single "Nur mir." The First Civil Senate upheld a 2022 ruling from the Hamburg Higher Regional Court, which had already found Pelham's use, from June 2021 onward, protected under the EU's pastiche exception to copyright.
Judge Thomas Koch framed the standard plainly: appropriation is acceptable when someone familiar with the original can recognize both the borrowing and the difference, a perceptible artistic or creative dialogue between the two works rather than straight copying. Turning an electronic loop into a hip-hop backing track, the court found, counts as that kind of dialogue.
What counts as pastiche under EU law?
The exception isn't new. The Court of Justice of the EU laid the groundwork in its 2019 ruling on this exact case, holding that a sample used in a modified form unrecognizable to the ear doesn't infringe, and that pastiche more broadly covers works that imitate or evoke another work while adding recognizable creative engagement. The BGH's September ruling is the first time a German top court has applied that standard to a finished, commercially released track rather than a hypothetical.
Not everyone reads it the same way. Andreas Walter of law firm Schalast, who has tracked the case, put it directly.
"Anyone who picks up a fragment of someone else's sound, transforms it, and places it in a genuinely new artistic context isn't copying, they're creating."
Florian Drücke, chairman of German music industry body BVMI, sees the same ruling as a risk running the other way, warning that pastiche could become "a free pass for unlicensed sampling" if courts apply it loosely.
Why does this matter for house and techno?
House and techno were built on samples nobody cleared: disco basslines chopped into loops, funk breaks flipped into drum tracks, vocal snippets pulled off old 12-inches. Kraftwerk itself is source material for entire genres, its drum machines and sequences running through decades of Detroit techno and beyond. A precedent that says a short, transformed loop can be legal without a licence, provided there's real creative distance from the original, gives producers something concrete to point to if a sample-clearance letter lands. It also hands labels and rights-holders a narrower target: prove there wasn't genuine transformation, or prove the sample stayed recognizable as the original rather than as raw material.
Is the case actually over?
Not entirely. The BGH's ruling settles Pelham's use of the sample from June 2021 onward. A separate constitutional complaint covering the 1999 to 2021 stretch of the dispute is still pending, the tail end of a fight that has already gone through German courts, Germany's Constitutional Court and the CJEU once already. Twenty-seven years in, "Nur mir" outlived the argument over whether it was allowed to exist.
