The Pelham Chronicles: sampling, copyright and fundamental rights

On 29 July 2019, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU or the ‘Court’) rendered its long-awaited judgment in Pelham.1 This judgement was published together, but not jointly, with those in Spiegel Online2 and Funke Medien.3 A bit less than a year later, on 30 April 2020, the German Federal Court of Justice (Bundesgerichtshof or BGH), which had referred the cases to Luxembourg, rendered its judgments in all three cases. There are obvious parallels between these judgments; their combined relevance for the interpretation of European copyright law in the light of EU fundamental rights cannot be understated.4