Revived ZimCopy promises to deliver ZimCopy board chairperson and acting director Dr Samuel Makore
ZimCopy board chairperson and acting director Dr Samuel Makore

ZimCopy board chairperson and acting director Dr Samuel Makore

Beaven Tapureta : Bookshelf

The new executive board at ZimCopy, a local collecting society that administers economic rights of creators and authors in Zimbabwe, has a huge workload on its shoulders as it moves in to regain lost confidence of local rights holders and prove itself capable of making up for the lull in which the outgoing Board rolled for the past two decades.Since its formation in 1995, ZimCopy, an affiliate of the International Federation of Reproduction Rights Organisation (IFFRO), has been a dwindling star for copyright holders, particularly writers some of whom do not even today understand what ZimCopy roles were or are.

Although the organisation was instrumental in setting up collecting societies in other African countries, it failed its own rights holders at home by dishonouring its objectives.

One by one, the donor and some publishers and authors who had attached themselves to ZimCopy began to withdraw and resign as it became clear the organisation had lost focus.

Sometime last year this writer wrote about an important document, that is, the National Copyright Strategy for Zimbabwe report which Zimcopy produced yet, until today, it seems the document has either remained a draft or its progress has not been reported back to stakeholders.

In an interview, the new Board chair and acting director of ZimCopy Dr Samuel Makore said while he bewailed his predecessors’ failure to practically uphold the wishes of the creative industry stakeholders in terms of their rights, particularly secondary rights, he is optimistic that his new team will revive ZimCopy and deliver.

Dr Makore, an academic author, said that topping the to-do list of his board is the creation of a membership with a strong component of creators. Right up to 2014, he said, ZimCopy operated without a membership register.

“First thing we are going to do is to register all potential rights holders, all who are affected, one way or another, by the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act. At the moment we have begun with reproduction rights holders,” Dr Makore said.

The envisioned membership drive, according to new chair, is targeted at rights holders such as publishers, publishers’ associations, writers’ associations, visual artists, composers and lyricists, and scriptwriters.

Asked what would be the membership status of self-publishers who are growing in numbers, Dr Makore said ZimCopy would not mind if they come in as publishers or authors.

However, if they choose to join as authors, for ease of management, all authors are expected to join through their existing associations.

Currently, in Zimbabwe there is no self-publishers’ association.

He added that upcoming publishers should be part of the Zimbabwe Book Publishers Association so that they learn from the experienced.

With a clear organisational structure defined in its constitution, Zimcopy had its net well-made to capture the large pool of creators across the country and the diaspora but it never threw it in when resources to do so were still available.

Its General Council, intended to include two representatives from each publishing house, writers’ organisation, or any association in the creative industry, and the Executive Board, on which three writers’ associations and three publishers should sit, got depleted as disillusion settled in.

The distribution board, supposed to handle the dispensation of revenue to rights holders in the manner the Zimbabwe Music Rights Association does to musicians, was non-existent as there was no revenue collected to distribute.

Two licensing officers were supposed to make the secretariat but there were no such personnel in ZimCopy save the executive director who resigned in December 2015.

Dr Makore said ZimCopy has a structure that should have made it function adequately but the structure never materialised despite a Norwegian donor having sponsored the organisation from 1999 to about 2014.

One of responsibility which the outgoing board sat on is the issuance of licenses to users of material subject to copyright.

This, he said, is one of the major objectives of ZimCopy, to “negotiate through license agreements the use of such works with users”.

While according to the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act there are exceptions to photocopying any copyrighted material, the mushrooming of copy shops in the cities has made copyright infringement look as if it is not a crime.

Given this background, the idea of compulsory or voluntary licensing, which is a provision of the Berne Convention (one of the chief international copyright agreements) to which Zimbabwe subscribes, is a major source of revenue for Zimcopy in addition to donor funding, Dr Makore explained.

“We will license them (copy shops), that is, give them permission to operate legally and also try to engage them in recording photocopying frequency data in a log sheet for ZimCopy. The tertiary institutions will also be licensed, charged a certain amount per student annually,” said Dr Makore.

The new board, which includes three publishers and three writers’ associations, is also coming into a situation in which those whom it expects to befriend do not understand what it does and why.

As its mandate, ZimCopy will hold workshops in partnership with the Ministry of Justice and Parliamentary Affairs to raise public awareness and educate law enforcement agents on copyright matters and anti-piracy.

The police, for instance, cannot make random raids on the book pirates spread all over. There has to be a systematic way of doing it, explained Dr Makore.

He promised authors that his organisation will also lobby Government to amend the Copyright and Neighbouring Act so that the Act tallies well with the digital publishing world. He said it is ZimCopy’s duty to advise Government. The old Board, he said, had laid the foundation for lobbying and his team will take it from there.

In other countries, collecting societies are state-owned whereas ZimCopy is an independent organisation although the Zimbabwean Government, through the Ministry of Justice and Parliamentary Affairs, should establish a copyright society as defined in the Copyright Act. Dr Makore said the Ministry is not to blame but the problem has been the way ZimCopy was being managed in the past.

“The problem is in us — the way we have been managing ZimCopy, we failed completely,” he said.

Should the new team at ZimCopy stick to their promise, its members, including authors, are destined to enjoy their “overdue” benefits such as effective management of their economic rights that flow from copyright protection, access to information and resources on copyright and related issues, and many others.

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