CISAC: Senegal hosts copyright conference

The participating groups, which include various copyright societies in Africa, will come together in Dakar from today, 11 September, to 13 September for a seminar dealing with ways of bettering “private copying systems across the continent,” reads an official CISAC statement. The aim is to “better support the livelihoods of creators”.

“We are aware that private copying is a great source of collections for creators. It allows creators to record their vision of the world today, and there is no price for that," says Algeria’s National Office of Copyright and Related Rights (ONDA) director-general, Sami Bencheikh El-Hocine.

The International Organisation of the Francophonie (OIF) will support the event. The seminar will unite partners the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) and the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisations (IFFRO) along with 12 collective management organisations (CMOs) working on the continent.

A focus on Africa has seen CISAC support the celebration of the Cabo Verdean Music Society's first distribution in April, organise a CMO meeting in Abidjan in July and give a workshop in Rwanda in August. Recently, the body's regional director for Africa, Samuel Sangwa, was at a panel on the state of intellectual property in Africa during the fifth African Union Pan-African Cultural Congress.

“Private copying is a key source of revenue for creators throughout the world, and is of growing importance especially in Africa,” CISAC said. “When properly implemented and enforced, systems for collecting and distributing private copying remuneration can become a solution to provide a better livelihood for creators and the cultural industry.

“In Burkina Faso and Algeria, it represented respectively 31.94% and 32.75% of total 2016 revenues according to the 2017 CISAC Global Collections Report. However, in all of Africa, private copying represents only 12% of total collections for African societies according to data from the CISAC Private Copying Global Study.”

Although much of the continent lags behind, there are some success stories. While Morocco and Tunisia have begun the process of collecting private copying courtesy of ONDA support, Ivory Coast, Senegal and Madagascar are closer to implementation.

These encouragements have spurred meetings in Abidjan, Algiers and Dakar – to lobby for changes from the legislature and to train national societies in collecting and distributing revenue to creators.