Kraftwerk lost lawsuit over “Metall auf metal”

Kraftwerk lost the lawsuit over “Metall auf metal”, one of the controversies for longest copyright infringement cases in the history of music. The controversy centered on a short excerpt of the German group’s 1977 song used in German rapper Sabrina Setlur’s 1997 song “Nur Mir”, produced by Moses Pelham and Martin Haas. The story began with a copyright claim in Germany in the late 1990s. Kraftwerk members Ralf Hütter and the late Florian Schneider initially won the case, with the judges arguing that the unauthorized use of their song constituted copyright infringement. However, this ruling was subsequently challenged, overturned and referred on several occasions to the Court of Justice of the European Union, setting a precedent for the regulation of sampling in Europe.

A 2019 ruling found that sampling a recognizable section of a recorded song can constitute copyright infringement unless the sample is modified to the point of becoming unrecognizable. Seven years later, a ruling issued last week by the Court of Justice of the European Union in Luxembourg ruled that a song can be considered a “pastiche” if it evokes an existing recording in a recognizable but transformed form, while remaining “significantly different” from the original and establishing an “artistic or creative dialogue” with the latter. The sentence represents a defeat for Kraftwerk, as it effectively confirms that Pelham and Haas’ use of sampling falls into the category of “pastiche”.