The
Copyright Society of Malawi (Cosoma) was established in 1992 and it operates
under the 1989 Copyright Act which protects copyrights and
"neighbouring" rights in Malawi.
Although
the Registrar General administers the Patent and Trademarks Act, which protects
industrial intellectual property rights in Malawi, Cosoma has a very central
role in this aspect.
In
April of 2015 I wrote that the rules that govern the World Trade Organisation
(WTO) allow Malawi because it is only a less developed country to delay full
implementation of the Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights
(Trips) agreement until 2016, which is two years ago.
Government
through the Industry and Trade Ministry was also working with Cosoma and the
Registrar General to align relevant domestic legislation with the WTO Trips
agreement with technical assistance from the Africa Regional Intellectual
Property Organization (Aripo).
Under
this arrangement Cosoma partnered with privately owned Zodiak Broadcasting
Station (ZBS) to be using an electronic system that has been able to capture
all musical works performed or played on the radio for the purposes of
collecting royalties. At the moment I am not sure where we are now.
I
also explained that there are three ways that musicians in Malawi can earn
through royalty collections. Cosoma collects mechanical royalties that it gives
to an artist after they record with a record company; broadcasting royalties
that comes from air play of an artist’s music by a radio or TV station as well
as; public performance royalties which is the money that the artist earns when
his or her music is played in public places like bars, public transport system,
hotels etc.
At
the time Dora Makwinja, Executive Director of Cosoma explained that in the past
they used to keep data on sales of music by authorized distributors especially
those that they had given licenses.
She
said when Afri Music Company was in the business of producing and distributing
music they used to have a good database of record sales and even for others who
were also in the same business because there was some kind of control.
Now,
with parallel markets where musicians are also selling their own musical works,
it is difficult to have a complete data of the record sales and therefore there
is a huge loss of royalty collection.
Before,
she said the system was beneficial to musicians like in 2009 when one musician
Lawrence Mbenjere set a new record when he became the first musician to cart
home money in excess of over K2.5 million in royalties.
There
were also challenges in collection especially in broadcasting royalties, where
some radio station including the state owned broadcaster the Malawi
Broadcasting Corporation (MBC) would fail to remit the royalties and at one
time in 2013 MBC owed Cosoma K8 million.
The Malawi Communication Regulatory
Authority (Macra) announced that it has acquired a machine called Consolidated
ICT Regulatory Management System (CIRMS).
Cosoma Senior Licensing Officer Rosario
Kamanga had indicated at the time that CIRMS, otherwise also known as the Spy
Machine would help them manage broadcasting royalties because other
broadcasting institutions were neither logging the number of times they had
played music of artists nor indicating at all whether they had played it or
not.
With the Spy Machine in full gear it
remains to be seen how these is now helping musicians in terms of royalties.
By the end of the day what is paramount
is ensuring that the musicians get sweets out of their sweat. I just hope
Cosoma has the answers.
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