TWO seconds of metallic music may seem a rather trivial basis for spending 12 years battling through the German courts. But that is what lawyers for Kraftwerk (pictured), an electropop band, and Moses Pelham and Martin Haas, two composers, have been doing.

In 1977, Kraftwerk produced a track called “Metall auf Metall” which features a continuous percussive phrase. Twenty years later Pelham & Haas released “Nur Mir”, featuring a rapper called Sabrina Setlur, which samples the same phrase.

Kraftwerk claimed this was an infringement of recording rights. In 2004, the Hamburg lower court agreed, forbidding further distribution of “Nur Mir”. Two years later, the Hamburg higher court reversed that decision but allowed an appeal to the Supreme Court, which after two more years referred it back to Hamburg.

The question at the heart of the case is how far sampling the work of other artists—a mainstay of modern hip-hop and techno—is permissible when creating new music. The answer given by the Supreme Court is that it is only permissible if the same effect could not have been produced by the new artist himself. After various demonstrations by expert witnesses, crashing metal on metal and using instruments such as a 1996 Akai Sampler, it was shown that an imitation of the sound-bite would have been possible in 1997. Hence, on December 13th, it ruled in favour of Kraftwerk.