Rights and trademarks
This is general information, not legal advice. Intellectual property law differs substantially between countries, the handpan situation in particular has been actively litigated for years and is still moving, and nothing on this page is a substitute for advice from a qualified lawyer in your own jurisdiction. If you are about to build, sell, import or name a product commercially, get proper advice.
BIZ-01Is “Hang” trademarked, and by whom?#
beginner
Short answer. Yes. Hang is a registered trademark of PANArt in Switzerland, registered in 2008, and it refers only to instruments PANArt themselves made. Calling a handpan by another maker a “Hang” is incorrect, and using the word commercially can attract a legal complaint.PANArt, the Bernese workshop of Felix Rohner and Sabina Schärer, created the Hang in 2000. As copies started appearing from around 2007, they registered Hang as a trademark in May 2008 specifically to stop the name becoming a generic term for the whole category. The registration was later extended to cover services such as courses and publications, which was aimed at people advertising lessons for other instruments under the Hang name.
Two consequences follow.
“Hang” names a specific set of instruments. PANArt made Hang instruments from 2000 until they stopped in late 2013, and they continue to use the brand for later instruments such as the Gubal. Roughly, the instruments split into first, second and third generation Hang plus the Free Integral Hang. If your instrument was not made by PANArt, it is not a Hang, regardless of what the seller called it.
“Hang drum” is doubly wrong. PANArt have been vocal that the instrument is not a drum, that the name misleads people into striking it too hard, and that they reject the term. It survives mostly because it is what people type into search engines. Sellers who use it are usually chasing traffic rather than making a claim about provenance, but it is still a term the makers themselves asked people to stop using.
For a private individual, none of this is a hazard. Saying “hang drum” in conversation is a vocabulary error, not an infringement. Trademark law bites on commercial use: selling, advertising, or branding goods and services. A shop listing generic instruments as “Hang drums for sale” is in a genuinely different position from a player using the phrase casually.
See also: BIZ-02, Naming and terminology
BIZ-02Is “handpan” a free term that anyone can use?#
beginner
Short answer. In general use, yes. It was coined as a deliberately generic term in 2007 and has been used freely by the whole industry ever since, which is exactly the outcome PANArt were trying to prevent for their own name.The word appeared on Pantheon Steel’s website in 2007. They were building an instrument in response to the Hang and needed a name for the category rather than for their own product, so they introduced “handpan” explicitly as a generic term for this family of instruments. It spread quickly, and the launch of the handpan.org forum in 2009 cemented it as the standard word.
Because it was born generic and has been used generically by hundreds of businesses for well over a decade, “handpan” functions as the category name in the way “guitar” or “ukulele” does. You can describe your instrument, your shop, your lessons or your build as a handpan without needing anyone’s permission.
Some qualifications worth knowing:
Composite brand names are a different matter. A word mark that happens to contain “handpan” alongside distinctive elements can be registrable and often is. Plenty of makers and retailers hold trademarks on their own names. Being free to use “handpan” descriptively does not mean you can call your business by a name confusingly similar to an existing one.
PANArt use the word differently. They apply “hand pan” to copies made by other manufacturers and describe their own work as sound sculptures rather than handpans. That is a rhetorical position within an ongoing dispute rather than a legal claim on the word.
“Pantam” is the term that took hold in Israel and among some players and makers there, and is used interchangeably with handpan. It is another generic alternative rather than a rival brand.
The practical guidance: use “handpan” as your default word. It is accurate, generic, uncontested and understood. Reserve “Hang” for actual PANArt instruments, and avoid “hang drum” in anything commercial.
BIZ-03Did PANArt patent the instrument, and what protection existed?#
intermediate
Short answer. They never held a patent on the instrument’s basic form as such. They did hold a patent on a nitriding manufacturing method, since revoked in Europe, plus US design patents on particular instrument appearances, and their main legal weapon has turned out to be copyright rather than patent law.Untangling the three things people conflate:
The utility patent on nitriding. PANArt filed in June 2009 for a method of producing a metallic sounding musical instrument using what they called exhaustive nitriding, nitriding the sheet through its full thickness rather than only at the surface. It was granted in the US in October 2013 and at the European Patent Office in 2014. The European patent was revoked in 2023, and members of the family lapsed in several countries from 2020 onwards for non payment of renewal fees. Note what this covered: a production process, not the shape of the instrument.
Design patents and registered designs. PANArt hold a series of US design patents filed in 2013 and 2015 and granted from 2015 onwards, covering the ornamental appearance of particular percussion instruments. A US design patent from an application filed before 13 May 2015 runs fourteen years from grant, and fifteen years for later filings, so several of these are still live. Design rights protect appearance, are jurisdiction specific, and are narrower than the copyright claim described below.
Copyright, which is where the real fight is. PANArt’s central argument has not been patent based at all. They argue the Hang is a work of applied art, a sound sculpture, and that its visual design is protected by copyright, which in most jurisdictions lasts for the author’s life plus seventy years and requires no registration. That is a far more powerful and far longer lived claim than any patent they ever held.
This is why the “the patent expired so handpans are fine now” claim you sometimes see in forums is wrong on two counts. The relevant patent covered a heat treatment method rather than the instrument, and the litigation that actually threatens builders was never about patents.
Going deeper. There is an irony here that the community notices: had PANArt patented the instrument’s form in 2000, the patent would have expired around 2020 and the question would be closed. Copyright in applied art potentially outlasts everyone currently involved.
BIZ-04Can I legally build and sell handpans?#
advanced
Short answer. Hundreds of makers do, worldwide, and building for yourself is not a realistic risk. Selling commercially is genuinely unsettled in Europe, because Swiss courts have found the Hang’s design protected by copyright and have begun ruling on which competing instruments infringe. Take proper legal advice before you build a business on it.The state of play, as clearly as it can be stated.
The dispute. From 2020 PANArt sent cease and desist letters to builders and retailers. Around twenty five manufacturers and distributors, mostly Dutch, German and Swiss, formed Handpan Community United (HCU) and brought proceedings in Bern seeking a declaration that the design was not protected.
2 July 2024. The Higher Court of the Canton of Bern ruled against HCU in a lengthy judgment, holding that the Hang qualifies as a protected work of applied art. It identified four protected features: the lenticular body formed from two synclastic shells, the central dome (the ding), the sound hole on the underside (the gu), and the circular arrangement of tone fields. Crucially, protection was found in the visual design, not in sound, tuning systems or acoustic principles.
27 February 2025. The Swiss Federal Supreme Court dismissed HCU’s appeal, but without re-examining the copyright analysis on the merits, on the basis that the question would not be reopened until the second phase had concluded.
16 June 2026. A second phase addressed which specific instruments fall within the scope of protection. Community reporting of the decision, published on the handpan blog Paniverse, describes the Bern Commercial Court assessing around 250 submitted designs and finding a good 200 of them infringing, with costs and compensation of roughly 175,000 euros awarded against the HCU parties and a thirty day appeal window. As of writing this has been reported by community sources rather than from a published court text, and the position may develop further.
What this means in practice.
- Building one for yourself at home is not what any of this is about. Nobody is litigating private makers.
- Selling commercially in Europe carries real, non theoretical risk if your instrument closely reproduces those four features.
- Outside Europe the picture differs. Copyright protection for applied art varies enormously between countries, and the Swiss and German rulings do not automatically apply elsewhere.
- Design workarounds discussed in the community include concave rather than domed central notes, non circular tone field arrangements, multiple central notes, and altered body profiles. Whether any given change is sufficient is a legal question, not a design question.
Get advice specific to your country and your design before committing money. This is exactly the situation the disclaimer at the top of this page exists for.
BIZ-05Can I use another maker’s scale names?#
intermediate
Short answer. Usually yes, and the industry does it constantly, but it is more a question of etiquette than law. Some scale names come from traditional music and belong to nobody, some were invented by specific makers, and at least one early maker asked others not to use theirs.Handpan scale names come from three places.
Traditional or ethnomusicological names. Pygmy, Hijaz, Akebono and similar names describe scale forms that long predate the instrument. Nobody owns them and everyone uses them.
Invented names from the early makers. PANArt’s Integral appears to have been among the first fabricated scale names on this instrument. Pantheon Steel and Bellart, both active from around 2007, coined a batch of evocative names for scales with no traditional label: Golden Gate, Ursa Minor, La Sirena and others. Aaron Ximm at Pantheon Steel named many of their sound models.
Later coinages by dozens of makers since, which is why the same set of pitches often circulates under several different names. The Bellart Protus and the PANArt Integral, for example, are the same scale.
The etiquette differs by maker. Pantheon Steel publicly gave other builders permission to use their scale names. Bellart did not want theirs used by others. There is no industry wide register and, as far as anything published shows, no general practice of trademarking scale names.
Practical guidance if you are selling instruments:
- Listing the actual notes is always safe and always more useful to the buyer. “D3 A3 Bb3 C4 D4 E4 F4 A4” tells a customer what they are getting; “Kurd” tells them what somebody called it.
- Use a traditional name freely. Nobody is going to object to Hijaz.
- Be careful with a distinctive invented name that is closely associated with one workshop, particularly if you are selling into their market. If a name functions in practice as a brand identifier, trademark risk is not zero even without a registration, and in any case it looks like trading off someone else’s work.
- Naming a scale you designed is entirely fair, and the community norm is to credit it.
The genuine problem in this area is not legal but informational. Scale names have proliferated to the point where they obscure rather than communicate. Whatever you call it, publish the notes.
See also: Scales and music theory, BIZ-02
BIZ-06Who owns the copyright in handpan music, and what about covers?#
intermediate
Short answer. If you compose it, you own it, automatically, from the moment you record or write it down. If you play someone else’s song, they still own the composition, and distributing or monetising your version normally needs a licence even though the arrangement is yours.Two separate copyrights exist in any piece of recorded music, and confusing them causes most of the mistakes in this area.
The composition is the tune and its underlying structure. It belongs to the writer.
The sound recording is the specific captured performance. It belongs to whoever made the recording, which for a solo handpan player recording at home is you. See BIZ-07.
Your own improvisations and compositions. Copyright arises automatically in most countries the moment the work is fixed, meaning written down or recorded. You do not need to register it, add a symbol or send yourself an envelope. Registration exists in some jurisdictions, notably the US, and improves your position in litigation, but it is not what creates the right. Practical advice: keep dated original files, since being able to show when you made something is what actually helps in a dispute.
An honest caveat about handpan music specifically. The instrument is diatonic and limited to a handful of pitches, so a great deal of handpan playing consists of similar patterns over similar note sets. Short, obvious ostinatos over a Kurd scale are unlikely to be treated as original works by anyone. Copyright protects expression with some originality, not the fact that you played the notes available to you.
Covers. Arranging a pop song for handpan does not make it your song. In most jurisdictions:
- Playing it live is typically covered by the venue’s blanket licence from the local collecting society, which is why venues pay those licences.
- Releasing an audio recording of it to streaming services normally requires a mechanical licence. Distributors usually offer this as a paid add on, and in some territories the licence is compulsory, meaning the rights holder cannot refuse if you pay the statutory rate.
- Putting it on YouTube brings you under that platform’s rights management system. Your video may be claimed and monetised for the rights holder rather than taken down, which is the usual outcome.
- Sync, meaning using someone’s recording or composition against video you control commercially, generally needs a negotiated licence and is not covered by any compulsory scheme.
Public domain works, which broadly means compositions where the writer died long enough ago, can be recorded and released freely. Your recording of them is still your recording.
BIZ-07Do I own the recordings I make of my own instrument?#
beginner
Short answer. Yes. You own the sound recording copyright in anything you record, and if the music is your own you own the composition too. The maker of the instrument has no rights in the sound it produces.This comes up because of the copyright dispute described in BIZ-04, and it is worth stating plainly: the Swiss ruling concerned the visual design of an instrument. It said nothing about who owns music played on one. Nobody has ever seriously claimed a royalty on handpan recordings on the basis of who built the pan, and the idea has no obvious foundation in law.
So, in normal circumstances:
- Your improvisation, your recording, your instrument. You own both copyrights outright. You can release it, licence it, sell it, put it on streaming platforms or give it away.
- Someone else’s composition, your recording. You own the recording. They still own the composition. See BIZ-06.
- A recording someone else made of you playing. This is the one people get wrong. The sound recording copyright generally sits with whoever made the recording, not with the performer, unless a contract says otherwise. If a videographer films you at a festival, the footage is usually theirs. Sort this out in writing beforehand rather than afterwards.
Things that can complicate ownership:
Collaborations. If two people improvise together, you likely have a joint work, and in many jurisdictions joint owners each need the others’ agreement to licence it. Agree splits early, in writing, however awkward the conversation feels.
Session work. If you were paid to play on someone’s track, check what you signed. Work for hire and buyout terms are common and can transfer everything.
Sample libraries and stock music. Read the terms. Some platforms take an exclusive licence, which stops you releasing the same recording elsewhere.
Distribution and collecting societies. Uploading to a distributor does not transfer ownership, but it does grant a licence, and joining a performing rights society involves assigning certain rights to them for administration. That is normal and how royalties get collected, but it is worth reading rather than clicking through.
Performers’ rights exist separately in many countries and give performers rights in recordings of their performances even when they do not own the recording. The detail varies a lot by jurisdiction.