WIPO announces music rights registry project for Africa

The Director General of the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO), Francis Gurry, launched a project to build a common digital platform to streamline the identification of protected musical works across 11 West African countries. This is meant to help creators from these countries get paid for their work through a simplified and standardized copyrights registration system. Interestingly, U.S. internet giant Google will be WIPO’s technology partner in developing this new web-based system.

The IT project will help royalty collecting and copyrights management organizations in the participating countries share information on the identification of works, making cross border licensing easier. The 11 countries involved in the current phase of the project are Benin, Burkina Faso, Côte d’Ivoire, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Senegal and Togo. This project contributes to  WIPO's goal of documenting and strengthening intellectual property rights in Africa. 

“The current data management process for registering works is complicated,” said Mr. Gurry. “The improved registry will streamline that process – it will store information online and make it accessible from each participating country. This means that a copyright holder will only have to register a work once to have the information stored across the 11 countries.” Mr. Gurry announced the project during a keynote presentation at the third World Copyright Summit in Brussels. 

The introduction of an online copyrights registry in Africa is in line with current developments in the European Union. EU Commissioner Neelie Kroes actively supports a similar project in Europe, called ARROW. According to Commissioner Kroes, such an automated system will not only make it easier to administrate (cross-border-) licensing agreements and online royalty payments, it will also, on the long term, help prevent artistic work from becoming ‘orphan works’. A work of art is orphanised if the legitimate owner cannot be tracked down, for example when the author is deceased and no relatives are known.

Mrs. Diabe Siby, Director General of Senegal’s Copyright Office, said the project “has the potential of enabling developing countries to participate more fully and effectively in the global music industry.”

Interestingly, Google seems to share the same motivation: "We are pleased to contribute (…), because we have a keen interest in making it easier for creators and performers to be remunerated for their works and in enabling new innovative content services to emerge online," said Mr. Carlo d'Asaro Biondo of Google. "Google has a history of working with public institutions like WIPO to build technology solutions; we will continue to build these partnerships to benefit creators, consumers and the public-at-large."

Ideally, these 11 societies will be connected to the rest of the world through this initiative, which will make rights information about West African music more accessible to other societies worldwide. WIPO will administer the new international online registry system.

Source: WIPO