Hello everyone,
 

We have received a 96 page verdict from the Court in Berne. In summary, the Court has decided that there is a copyright on the Hang, but no decision has been made on its impact on current handpans.

At this point, we have the option to appeal this decision or move on to the next part of the proceedings, where it will be decided how broad such a copyright is and if existing handpans (in their various variations) in fact infringe it. This is the most important part of the proceedings, as our main goal is for handpan builders to be able to continue to build handpans without major restrictions.

Irrespective of whether we appeal this first decision or not, our lawyers feel optimistic that the outcome of the second stage of the proceedings will be favorable and most currently existing handpan variations and designs will continue to be available to handpan enthusiasts in the future.

However, in order to reach this decision we must be able to sufficiently fund the further proceedings. We will discuss this matter in more detail in our next publication.

Sincerely,

The HCU admin team