James, As I said copyright can be complicated and it's taken me two years and 2 trips to South Africa to understand this fully. My point was, ALL copyright owners of a song MUST authorize the song to be sold. If only 2 persons out of 4 owners allow the song to be sold, then copyright infringement takes place for the other 2 persons. Of course this changes if the 4 persons had appointed the 2 persons to represent them. Please remember my complain, there is a website that is offering our content FREE and although we have channels to sell our content consumers go for FREE. Example, at one point, this website and all other "legal" website existed on the a network operator's wap home page. On your issue about hottest downloads. The hottest downloads are in a website where content is being pirated. If music is to be offered for free, let the OWNERS of the music do the free offers. Regards -----Original Message----- From: James Kariuki [mailto:jkariuki@gmail.com] Sent: Thursday, September 27, 2012 11:50 AM To: Bernard Kioko [Bernsoft Interactive Limited] Cc: KICTAnet ICT Policy Discussions Subject: Re: [kictanet] Music Piracy in Kenya - Government can Help
Not every Kenyan can play music from other forms. Some people still have Cassettes and CD players. The issue of how music is sold to you is secondary AFTER its copyright has been managed. Lets not confuse the issue of copyright infringement with that of access to music.
Today am having a long and slow day - forgive me if am missing something. You raise this issue here first because the music is 'pirated' and sold not as recorded/burnt CDs but as downloads off a website. You also say that those accessing the music from some of the hosting sites are doing so illegally because there is copyright infringement. If there no access issue, copyright infringement would not arise in the first place. My question to you is: how have you placed yourself in the music industry to cater for a growing need of electronic access (through downloads) of your music? I ask this because the lack of a legal access to the music could have created an avenue for others to profit illegally.
Licensing limited number of duplicates just means an artist can tell the person making CDs to make 100,000 for now and when they need to make more, they contact the artist. On the internet though, downloads can move from 1 to 1m in day....
If this is your view. But I think this is a 20th century way of managing copyright and restricting access. On a different note, have you tried through your sources to establish if the hottest downloads are also the fastest moving sales? I remember reading something a while back to the effect that availing your music freely for download could bolster your sales. --James