adminArtistes who attended Zimura annual general meeting in Bulawayo aired their willingness to have control on how their work should be reproduced and duplicated.
According to Zimura, mechanical rights are rights to reproduce, duplicate and publish work according to section 17 of the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act Chapter 26:05.
The law states that the owner of the copyright is given exclusive rights to do or authorise the reproduction, publishing the work and perform the work in public.
The law also gives the owner the right to authorise or to import the work into Zimbabwe or exporting from Zimbabwe, “otherwise than for the personal and private use of the person importing or exporting it and also for public performances”.
Addressing musicians at the meeting, Albert Nyathi, who is also the board chairman of Zimura, said they had so far not received a lot of assignments for the administration of mechanical rights.
The chief reason was that most musicians signed contracts that meant that the recording companies were the ones who held the rights until a specific period had lapsed. Some of the contracts tied them up to 20 years.
Zimura Bulawayo branch manager Clarence “Kira” Garura said most recording companies were doing virtually nothing to protect artistes’ mechanical rights and this was seen through rampant piracy in the country.
He said as long as the artistes’ mechanical rights were not properly managed they would always lose out on sales and on internet music downloads.
“When artistes assign their mechanical rights to Zimura it will mean we now have full control of the right to reproduce and duplicate. It means we will then issue licences to internet service providers for the music downloads and also license ringtone providers for the benefit of music composers,” Garura said.
He said these providers needed to furnish them with log sheets or returns on whose music had been down loaded and how many times.
“Zimura will then channel the monies to the relevant music composers like we do with broadcasting royalties,” he said.
Speaking on the sidelines of the meeting, another Bulawayo artiste, Asaph Kudita, questioned Zimura’s capacity to manage another portfolio.
“Zimura guys are doing a fabulous job as regards collection of royalties, but I think they will be overwhelmed by the workload at present. Some argue that they should have a department that handles the matter within Zimura.
“But this work needs entrepreneurial lawyers and journalists who have the industry at heart for example or better still people with real bite professionally to help deal with the complexity of collecting royalties as well as protect copyrighted work in an ever changing technological and economic landscape,” he said.
Kudita said there was nothing wrong legally speaking for any group of people to come forward with a plan and set up the organisation which could be set up as a trust.
“The constitution allows it. In my view, you would need to mix lawyers, music majors, auditors and even journalists to give it a wide enough scope in terms of skill set,” he said.
Online Reporter