Piracy in Africa needs urgent attention

Lazarus Sauti

Piracy is not only illegal but an evil act. It is a scourge that is fast destroying the world’s creative industry. In Africa, a continent where rhythm, words and voices colour every part of daily life this cancer (piracy) needs urgent attention.

It is sad to note that in most African countries, pirated music, film and books are sold on the roadside in view of everyone. This eliminates all opportunities for our creative industry to develop. Wherever piracy flourishes, it is virtually impossible for local film, music and book industries to compete, to grow, or to develop at all.

Zimbabwe's Gramma Records and its subsidiary stables – the Zimbabwe Music Corporation (ZMC) and Ngaavongwe Records failed to release new albums for the last year’s festive season,

Gramma Records managing director, Emmanuel Vori was quoted in a local newspaper last year saying: "We were disappointed in 2011 when most of our hit albums did not do it for us.” We know that pirates are waiting for us to release so that they can pirate and make a killing. We will only release February 2013."

Scavengers are benefiting from the work of artists while the artists remain poor. This destroys the future of the artist and producer. It affects the government and the community at large.

 “Music, film and book piracy is a problem not only for those in the creative industry but also for the government and the community of this country”, Titus ‘Kaapse Dans’ Headger, Anti-Piracy Organisation of South Africa’s Head of Inspections was once quoted.

Pirates pay no advances to performers, no royalties on sales, no licensing fees to composers, songwriters, and publishers, no fees to graphic artists and photographers, and no tax revenues on their sales. Common sense says when the overall revenue from music decreases, recording companies are more hesitant to sign new talented artists and more reliant on the earnings from the most profitable ones. The result is a creative industry that is more challenging for new players to enter.

Also piracy betrays the owners of copyrighted works. In the process, it threatens the livelihood of most if not all practitioners in the creative industries. Beyond the simple economic loss caused by piracy, inadequate respect for cultural works, and the heritage they embody, is the inevitable further consequence of piracy, an effect that runs entirely counter to national efforts to promote indigenous culture and identity.

This piracy affects the artists in a way that it sometimes results in family breakdown. Most artists die in poverty and the question from the public is where all the money they earned from their music or film is. The public tend to forget that all the money has gone to other people’s pockets through piracy.

It is a fact that the creative industry all around the world is being confronted with the reality of piracy. Although the industrialised nations have come up with strategies and technologies to decrease, discourage and even dismantle some piracy networks, Africa has hardly taken off on that route. Consequently, both artists and related actors in the music industry in Africa are seeing their investments annihilated by small greedy interest groups known as pirates.

Therefore to put food on their tables, creative players need to give their fans more of a reason to purchase their creative products from their production and publishing houses directly instead of getting it illegally. Publishers and producers should make CDs, DVDs and books available at more affordable prices. The emphasis should shift to developing better ways to compensate musicians, authors and those who represent them.

Practitioners in the creative industry should be more active and work with law enforcement authorities to make copyright infringement more risky than it is now. Investment in the cultural sector of any country can be significant and sustained over many years, if investors find in place both an adequate legal system for the protection of the rights in intellectual property and effective enforcement of those rights.

African governments must unleash the talents and abilities of their creators and entrepreneurs, including peasants, their manufacturers and their hugely popular but under-rewarded musicians. Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) rhumba star Josar Nyoka Longo, popular known as Zaiko Langa Langa, once called on countries in the Southern African Development Community (SADC) region to come up with laws which will protect musicians from practices such as piracy.

Nyoka said SADC member states are losing a lot of revenue through such illegal activities.

He said: “For example in Congo there are 62 million people but as a musician you cannot sell more than one million Compact Disks (CDs). If we can have laws which protect Copper and Cobalt, even us artistes we need laws to be put in place to protect our work.”

The Congolese musician was speaking during a press briefing at Lute Lodge in Kitwe. Longo further said that governments in the SADC region need to work hand-in-hand and ensure that laws to reduce piracy are put in place.

Piracy is against the law - making unauthorised copies of copyrighted work is against the law. Thus, street vendors who sell pirated copies of CDs, DVDs and textbooks must be brought to book. Backyard printers and photocopiers who initiate piracy must also be prosecuted.

On a sad note, the justice system treats piracy as a minor offense compared to other crimes. Outside South Africa, most African legal systems fail to protect the intellectual property that musicians already produce, preventing this potential from flourishing. Creative sectors contribute more than 11 percent to GDP in the world's wealthiest countries. In Africa overall, they barely register 1 percent.

Piracy is only part of the failure of the rule of law: recording companies underpay musicians and renege on agreements, radio stations ignore licence fees for tunes they air, governments impose special taxes on live performances, and most royalty agencies are state-owned or politically influenced.

African governments should put in place new protocols or a new charter to deal directly with piracy.

This new legislation should explore some of the issues already covered in the Berne Convention, Trips Agreement and Wipo treaties. Under the new legislation, the copyright owners should have exclusive rights over the use of their material including the right to reduce the material such as printing and saving, the right to communicate the material to the public, such as faxing, emailing, text messaging, web hosting and the right to distribute the material.

In whatever material form a work is created, it should be copyright protected.

The failure to enforce copyright renders worthless the only assets that artists own, their songs. Making money from their craft remains a dream and the incentives to invest in musicians disappear.

This failure has destroyed once-celebrated music industries in West Africa and has damaged development in the remaining musical hot spots, even in South Africa.