Sierra Leone Celebrates New Copyright Act

Sierra Leone Celebrates New Copyright Act

By Afro Ng'ombe   Tuesday, July 19, 2011   No comments:

As announced in the Awareness Times, Sierra Leone’s parliament approved a new copyright act, replacing the old 1965 Act.

“Claded [sic] in white T-Shirts with various anti-piracy inscriptions, throngs of celebrants used loud musical sets placed on top of vehicles, plus traditional musical instruments including the popular ‘Bubu’ instruments, to party all day long along major streets in Freetown.

Most of the celebrants carried photo banners of President Ernest Bai Koroma, while chanting songs of praises for the latter’s move in making sure the copyright bill becomes law under his watch.”

Wonder if they got permission to use those photos or paid royalties for the music they were playing…

Unfortunately, as Afro-Leo could find neither the old act nor the new act online, that’s the extent of this report.  Anyone have either of them or information on what may be different in the new act?

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Zimbabwe Considering Copyrighting Laws

Zimbabwe Considering Copyrighting Laws

By Afro Ng'ombe   Tuesday, November 02, 2010   No comments:

The Zimbabwean has a detailed article discussing the proposed amendment to the Zimbabwe Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act (pdf).  The proposed amendment comes from Clause 16 of the General Laws Amendment Bill  (Afro-Leo tried to find a copy of this Bill, but could not find any more recent than 2005).

According to the article, the bill proposes to put the items currently exempted from copyright under Section 10 of the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act within the scope of copyright.  Section 10 (6) excludes most government works: official texts of enactments, official texts of Bills [Guess they won’t be any easier to find anytime soon], official records of judicial proceedings and decisions, items published in the Gazette, things published in the Trade Marks Journal [Wonder how that will affect TM infringement cases if it’s difficult to find out what’s in the Journal], and official texts of international agreements [that one will be super hard to enforce since the agreements are in the public domain so many other places]. 

The Zimbabwean article explains how this proposal might violate the Zimbabwe Constitution by violating the freedom of expression granted in Section 20.  The article also points out that this proposal is a bad idea because that people must be able to know what the law is in order to follow the law.  Somehow, when reading the article, one gets the idea that’s the point of the amendment.

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Rwanda's new IP law -- in full!

Rwanda's new IP law -- in full!

By Jeremy   Thursday, June 03, 2010   1 comment:

Many thanks to my dear colleague on the Afro-IP weblog Paul Asiimwe for providing us all with this pdf copy of Rwanda's new state-of-the-art intellectual property law. Don't be put off by the fact that it's 367 pages long -- it's not because of the detail but because the text appears in the country's three national languages.

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