Friday 8 June 2018

Whither Malawi’s Royalty Collection

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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