Really tragic, honestly, the way Coleman’s life ended without him being properly recognized and compensated for what is possibly one of the most sampled pieces of audio ever.
It is actually interesting. A comparison that’s striking is the story of the song Bittersweet Symphony where all royalties and credits went to the Rolling Stones after they sampled 7 seconds. It seems like Jagger and Richards did eventually gave those back decades later.
But with modern ML techniques we could probably supercharge intellectual property protection and people could always extract royalties from samples of theirs.