Copyright Board To Review Guidelines for Collective Management Organisations

This blogger has learned that KECOBO is in the process of the review its CMO Guidelines titled “Guidelines for Licensing Collective Management Organisations”. These CMO Guidelines are available on KECOBO’s website here. Therefore, this blogger hopes to provide an in-depth examination of the Guidelines while making comments on important areas and issues connected with the Guidelines.

In coming up with these Guidelines, KECOBO explains in the opening paragraph that it is mandated under the Act to license and supervise CMOs in Kenya so to ensure that CMOs carry out their core function, namely the collection and distribution of royalties. It is noteworthy that since 2011 when the Guidelines were introduced, KECOBO has been enforcing these Guidelines against CMOs despite the fact these guidelines have no force of law. It is therefore advisable that KECOBO causes the inclusion of these Guidelines in Regulations to be made by the Minister (Attorney General) under section 49 of the Act.

Notwithstanding the legal force of these Guidelines, this blogger has the following comments to make on the Guidelines:

1. Title: this blogger suggests that the title of the Guidelines be amended to include “and Supervising”.

2. Public Notice: KECOBO may wish to include a time frame within which notices shall be published to increase KECOBO’s accountability and transparency. In addition, KECOBO may wish to specify which platform(s) will carry the public notices eg. local dailies with national circulation, KECOBO’s official website, KECOBO notice board?

3. Licensing: In the spirit of transparency and accountability, KECOBO may consider including a time frame within which licenses shall be processed once all application documents are submitted.

4. New Applications: The requirement under (g) appears vague and KECOBO may consider specifying what documents would be required to satisfy that the applicant has the “capacity for collection and distribution of the royalties”.

5. Renewal of License: To avoid duplication of documents submitted by licensed CMOs, the requirements of (a) and (b) should be removed. In the alternative, the requirement (b) should be qualified for cases where the memorandum and articles of association have been amended.
With regard to requirement (i), submitting individual deeds of assignment for each and every member may be onerous for most CMOs due to the sheer bulk of documentation to be produced. At any rate, KECOBO may decide to verify the deeds during an inspection visit to ensure that it corresponds with the list of members submitted.

6. Revocation of a license: The CMO Guidelines have made several additions to the grounds provided under the Act. However the wording and punctuation of this list of grounds for revocation is ambiguous as it does not disclose whether all the ten (10) listed grounds must be present for revocation or whether the presence of one or several grounds is sufficient.

In sum, this blogger submits that the Guidelines play an important role of supplementing the existing legal provisions on licensing and supervision of CMOs found in the Copyright Act, 2001 and Copyright Regulations, 2004. However these Guidelines ought to be given the force of law in order for KECOBO to enforce them against CMOs.

Editor’s note: The author currently works with MCSK however the views, opinions and analyses expressed herein are solely those of the author and are not those of his employers, both past and present.