Panart on the assault with legal battles against numerous handpan makers

PANArt has also been at the centre of a major intellectual-property dispute with the wider handpan-making world. Since around 2020, PANArt has argued that the original Hang® is not merely a musical instrument but a protected work of applied art, and has pursued claims against makers and retailers whose instruments use the familiar handpan form: two joined steel shells, a central “ding,” circular tone fields, and a resonating “gu” opening. In July 2024, the Commercial Court of Bern accepted that the Hang can qualify for Swiss copyright protection, though the key practical question remains how far that protection extends, and whether modern handpans actually infringe it. The dispute has caused concern among independent makers, many of whom formed or supported Handpan Community United to resist what they see as an attempt to control a whole instrument category through copyright rather than normal design or patent limits.

Sadly, there does not seem to be much wisdom in PANArt’s present course. Now that China — hardly famous for delicate respect of Western intellectual-property boundaries — is mass-producing handpans with apparent impunity, the decision to pursue a handful of long-standing makers and developers feels strangely backward. The handpan has become more than an object. It has become a social glue: a small, shimmering culture of makers, players, travellers, healers, teachers and listeners who have gathered around the sound. To then sour that beauty with selective litigation against the very people who helped carry the instrument into the world feels, at best, painfully short-sighted.

Of course, nearly every modern handpan is obviously inspired by, or descended from, the Hang®. Nobody sensible would deny PANArt’s importance. But what exactly is being achieved by trying to pull the genie back into the bottle now? Licensing fees? Compensation? A late assertion of control? A private sense of justice finally satisfied? It is difficult not to wonder whether some of this comes from frustration that more of the design, process, and commercial territory was not protected earlier, before the idea escaped into the public domain and was then adapted, copied, refined, loved, cheapened, elevated and — yes — bastardised by all and sundry.

That is the sad irony. PANArt gave the world something genuinely beautiful, then appears to have watched the world do what the world always does: imitate, evolve, commercialise and mutate. The result may not always be pure, but it is alive. And once an instrument becomes alive in the hands of a global community, trying to claw it back through courtrooms risks damaging the very magic that made it worth protecting in the first place. Shame they could not find a less stressful, less damaging, and more generous path to satisfy whatever hunger now drives the fight. Shame indeed.