PanForge

But why build this tool? Why now? Because handpan design has become a battleground – and makers need to understand what's at stake.

Context

We are in December 2025. The trial opposing PANArt to the Handpan Community United is coming to an end and should deliver its verdict during 2026. This decision will determine which elements of the Hang design can or cannot be freely used by instrument makers.

Depending on the verdict, the four elements PANArt claims as distinctive may or may not receive legal protection. But regardless of the outcome, this trial reveals a broader reality: handpan design has become a legal and economic battleground.

The Two Faces of Design Protection

Intellectual property is a double-edged sword.

It can attack: locking shapes, preventing exploration, turning the public domain into private property. PANArt has already registered numerous variations of their original design—as creators, they have every right to do so. Yet this approach may raise challenges for new design research, since design and function often overlap in our complex craft. More worryingly, industrialists are beginning to protect designs that existed in common use—such as Raysen's filing in August 2024 (published March 2025, CNIPA reg. 309164156), whose scope raises questions the community will need to examine.

But it can also defend: guaranteeing craftsmen a space of creation that industrialists cannot simply copy and mass-produce.

Here is the economic reality: an industrial manufacturer can now produce 1,000 handpans for €250 per unit. A European craftsman, with their costs, their time, their standards, cannot compete on this ground. Quality, customer experience, human connection—all of this matters, but facing a coming global economic crisis, price often remains decisive.

If industrialists lock innovative designs, or worse, capture those that craftsmen have developed collectively, our trade will disappear.

A Proposal: Adapted Copyfarleft

We are dwarves standing on the shoulders of giants. No mutant without the Hang. No Hang without the steel pan. No steel pan without paint cans smashed at Trinidad Carnival. Every shape we create owes a debt to those who came before. This is why we should protect our work – and why we should share it.

We refuse two extremes: total appropriation, which kills collective creativity; and naive openness, which hands our work to industrialists.

We propose a third way, inspired by the copyfarleft movement and Dmytri Kleiner's Peer Production License: freedom conditioned by production volume.

We call it the Craft Commons License – Share Alike – a model adaptable to any craft, with a threshold suited to each maker. As a handpan maker, I would personally set it at 100 units per year, which I believe is already too high for mass producers to bother with, yet ambitious for a solo maker. Any derivative must remain under the same license, keeping the commons alive.

This approach:

Protects new makers who want to explore existing forms. Enables sharing between craftsmen without formalities. Prevents industrial capture of collective innovations. Creates a defensive commons rather than a vulnerable public domain.

Call to Makers

If you share this vision, we invite you to:

Publish your exploratory designs under this license. Document the anteriority of your creations through our Creativity Wall—dated photos, publications, archives that establish proof. Contribute to the legal reflection—lawyers, makers, free culture activists: we need you. File your designs legally. Share them freely with those who hammer.

The handpan was born from creativity and years of hard work: two people invented an instrument and shared it with the world. This became the root of an overwhelming passion for many makers spreading it through their own creativity and hard work. May that story go on forever.

Keep hammering. It's a work in progress.