copyright, folklore and music piracy in ghana
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Copyright, folklore and music piracy in GhanaJohn Collins aa Department of Music , University of Ghana ,Published online: 29 Feb 2008.
To cite this article: John Collins (2006) Copyright, folklore and music piracy in Ghana, Critical Arts: South-North Culturaland Media Studies, 20:1, 158-170
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Copyright, folklore and music piracy in GhanaJohn Collins
ISSN 0256 004 Online 1992-6049 pp. 158–17020 (1) 2006 © Unisa Press
158
Abstract
This paper examines the problems inadvertently created by modern notions of musical
copyright (i.e. based on the individual ownership of specific works) introduced to Ghana
via trans-national organisations such as multinational record companies, the business side
of international ‘superstars’ and global copyright societies. The resulting conundrums for
Ghana’s musical evolution that will be examined in this paper, are of three types, namely:
1. Eurocentric copyright parameters
Indigenous notions of the multiple components (tune, words, rhythm, movement and dance)
of performance and the inseparability of performer and composer are challenged by imported
Western copyright notions that treat music as just melody and lyrics, and place the onus of
authorship solely on the composer.
2. An over-zealous anti-piracy crusade
The seemingly militant anti-copyright-piracy campaign in Ghana during the 1980s, that
involved the active intervention of foreign record companies, wiped out a whole generation
of young Ghanaian entrepreneurs, preventing them from establishing a legal, decentralised
music production industry based on cassette technology.
3. The WIPO/Paul Simon factor
Due to the combined effects of recommendations by WIPO (World Intellectual Property
Organisation) and royalty payments to Ghana by the American musician Paul Simon for
the WEA/Warner release ‘Rhythms of the Saints’, the idea of a folkloric licence or tax being
applied to Ghanaian nationals for the commercial use of their own indigenous folklore was
muted for some years. In 2006 this idea was incorporated amidst stiff opposition, into the
country’s new Copyright Bill.
Keywords: Copyright; Eurocentric parameters; folklore of developing nation; nationalisation
of folklore; who owns folklore; music piracy; decentralised music production; Ghana.
John Collins, Department of Music, University of Ghana
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Copyright, folklore and music piracy in Ghana
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This article looks at two quite different problems that the introduction of modern
music copyright has created in Ghana since the 1980s. One is an over-zealous anti-
piracy campaign (with intervention from foreign record companies) which wiped
out a whole generation of young Ghanaian entrepreneurs who stood to develop a
legal, decentralised music production industry based on cassette technology. The
other is the nationalisation of folk music (and folklore generally) in Ghana and the
subsequent attempt to apply an internal folkloric copyright tax on local people for
the commercial use of their own indigenous folklore, in a developing nation where
there is still a vibrant and vital folk culture.
What is interesting in both these cases is the involvement of Western international
organisations in initiating these developments: the International Federation of
Phonogram Industries (IFPI) in the case of the anti-piracy ‘crusade’, and Warner
Brothers and the World Intellectual Property Organisation (WIPO) in the case
of the folk tax. Furthermore, both cases are relevant to the current controversy
concerning the attempt of large multinational record companies to declare illegal
free music downloading off the Internet and to the issue of creating modalities for
paying indigenous peoples patents and royalties for aspects of their folk technology
(particularly biological knowledge and expertise) that are being commercially
exploited by the industrial nations.
However, before looking at these two areas of copyright in Ghana I will
briefly look at some general problems1 created by imported Eurocentric copyright
parameters which are often at odds with the ‘traditional’ artistic norms of African
and other developing nations that are based on older but widespread pre-industrial
world views.
In the West, copyright began with book publishing and evolved during a period
when Europe and the United States were going through an industrial revolution
that was linked to ideologies of possessive individualism, the Protestant work ethic
and artistic ‘romanticism’ with its focus on the ‘immortal composer’. As a result,
copyright involves Eurocentric assumptions, some of which are listed below:
1 A specific artwork (or intellectual idea) is the private property of its author/
composer (and publisher) for a definite number of years (now 70 years after the
death of the author/composer), after which the work falls into the free public
domain.
2 Because folkloric artistic forms rooted in the past or in pre-industrial societies
are anonymous, Western copyright law treats them as public property and by
extension as belonging to a common heritage of the world.
3 There can be no copyright unless an artwork has been written down, recorded
or otherwise reduced to material form: a clear reflection of copyright’s origin in
book publishing.
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John Collins
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One of the ‘traditional’ norms that is at odds with these conceptions is that there is
seldom any emphasis on music as a form of private property that can be used for
individual commercial gain. A few examples will illustrate this. When the Americans
introduced copyright laws to Japan in the 1880s, a term had to be invented for it
– kenri, from ken or right and ri or property – as the Japanese Confuscianist notion
of social order (giri) was, unlike rugged American individualism, based on collective
rather than personal rights (see Mitsui 1993). The hill people of Papua New Guinea
downplay personal input in their evolving oral song traditions as these are meant to
represent the voices of the ancestors: excessive individual display is therefore seen
as hubris.2 Even in the case of the music knowledge of traditional communities being
owned by specific initiation groups, cults, clans and secret or esoteric societies, it is
generally used for sacred or socially functional rather than commercial purposes (see
Nason 1997)3.
The Eurocentric assumption about the anonymity of folklore leads to another
difference between ‘traditional’ and industrial societies. The nineteenth-century term
folk music was coined for art forms that are so old and anonymous that they have
fallen into the public domain, and need to be preserved in museums and archives,
or by special clubs and societies. In the West there is, therefore, a relatively clear
demarcation4 between folk music on the one hand, and contemporary popular or
classical works on the other, composed, owned and copyrighted by identifiable
individuals. Thus in the West the realms of the folk music archivist and the copyright
official do not overlap. However, in many developing countries (including those
in Africa) a living, orally transmitted folk tradition simultaneously coexists, at the
present moment, with privately owned creative artworks. In these cases the realms of
folklore and copyright do overlap. It is precisely the possibility of modern copyright
notions negatively impacting on a living ‘folklore’5 that has created such a conundrum
in Ghana.
The third Eurocentric assumption is that only literary or other materially recorded
artworks (i.e. printed, scored, choreographed or taped) can generate royalties. In this
view, African oral folklore cannot be copyrighted and its author or authors cannot
collect royalties. This view favours literate and technologically versed artists at the
expense of non-literate ones.6
All these are considerations to bear in mind as we consider the negative
consequences of music piracy countermeasures in Ghana in the 1980s and related
implications of the current dispute over applying copyright to the folkloric realm.
An over-zealous anti-piracy campaign
At present the big record companies are faced with the problem of dealing with a
decentralised music technology based on MP3s, Napster, Freenet and a succession
of similar Internet systems. However, the response of the big record companies
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161
and multinationals is rather to take Napster to court and sue thousands of users for
downloading music files.7
This is not the first time the big record companies (wanting to keep central control
of the global music markets) have lobbied to criminalise the decentralised fruits of
new technologies. One only has to go back 20 years to their struggle to stop cassette
piracy. Phillips, one of the big record companies, invented the cassette recorder in
the 1960s but never dreamt that the Japanese would refine this technology into the
hi-fi product of the 1970s and 1980s that could compete with vinyl records. As a
result, there was a world-wide battle against cassette pirates.
In the West matters were resolved in favour of the multinational record companies
by the amazingly sudden phasing out of records and cassettes and the introduction
of compact discs which at first (pre-CD burners and MP3 files) only they could
manufacture and distribute.
However, entire music manufacturing technologies in many developing nations
were based almost solely on ‘cottage industry’ cassette production instead of the
expensive large plants used for manufacturing records. Instead of finding methods
of legalising cassette production in these new nations, the Western record companies
and their organisations, such as the International Federation of Phonograph Industries
(IFPI), pursued a policy that thwarted the emergence of legalising decentralised
cassette production. In Ghana in the 1980s a whole generation of young ‘pirate’
entrepreneurs quickly seized on the new technological benefits of low-cost cassette
duplication and began to legalise their status but were then recriminalised following
lobbying by the IFPI and its agents in Ghana.
In short, over the past 30 years technology has twice created decentralised methods
of music production (analogue cassettes and now digital MP3s) that the big record
companies have tried to cripple and criminalise in their attempt to retain musical
hegemony.
In this context of the musical tussle between the multinationals and developing
nations, between centralised and decentralised modes of production, between ‘centre’
and ‘periphery’, it will be worth taking a detailed look at exactly what happened in
Ghana in the 1980s.
Ghana was the first West African country to develop its own recording studios and
pressing plants8 and by the mid 1970s it had four recording studios and two pressing
plants. One, the jointly owned Ghanaian/Polygram Record Manufacturers of Ghana,
was pressing half a million singles and a hundred thousand albums a year. The other
was Ambassador Records, built in 1965 in Kumasi and capable of pressing 10 000
vinyl records (45 rpm and album form) a day.9
However, by the late 1970s and due to the corrupt kalabule military regimes
of Colonel Acheampong and General Akuffo, Ghana went into severe economic
decline; its vinyl record manufacturing industry collapsed and the country moved
towards cassette production, mainly by an estimated 5 000 illegal operators who
transferred music from record to cassette in small kiosks.10 In 1987, 800 of these
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music pirates came together in an organisation called the Ghana Tape Recordists
Association (GTRA ) which attempted to legalise their position. They did this by
making a licensing deal with the local producers union (the National Phonogram
Producers Union (NPPA)) to copy their works and pay a blanket fee for each kiosk
operator of 20 000 cedis (then US$25) a year. The arrangement was endorsed in
the same year by the government Copyright Administration, then under the late Mr
Adoi-Anim. In June 1989 the GTRA (then numbering about 1 000 members) paid a
first instalment of 4.5 million cedis (almost US$6 000) to the NPPA.
However, there was objection to this legalising of music pirates from the
Musicians Union of Ghana (MUSIGA) and a group of producers who broke away
from the NPPA in 1989 and called themselves the Phonogram Producers Society
(PPS). That same year some officials of the London-based International Federation
of Phonogram Industries (an association of Western record companies) who were
in Accra supported this anti-piracy legalisation move by making the PPS its official
chapter in Ghana and giving it US$20 000 to fight piracy.11
The position of MUSIGA, the PPS, IFPI and an organisation called the Ghana
Professional Band Leaders Association was of course that they were protecting the
rights of musicians and producers in the face of the massive world-wide upsurge in
cassette piracy.12 However, the IFPI had another agenda, which was to retain central
control of the world music industry. The last thing it wanted was for modalities to be
created for legalising cassette music piracy.
Owing to pressure from these local and international organisations, the newly
established governmental National Commission of Culture (NCC) intervened and
in September 1990 they persuaded the Copyright Administration to rescind its
endorsement of the blanket licence agreement between the GTRA and NPPA.13
In November 1990 the NPPA was also persuaded to reverse the agreement.14
Subsequently, and in spite of protests from the now recriminalised GTRA,15 an
active anti-piracy task force composed of the Copyright Administration, MUSIGA,
the PPS and the police began to arrest kiosk operators and cassette street hawkers.16
Ironically, an arrangement had already been put in place in 1988 that could have
solved the whole problem. This was a 40 per cent levy on imported blank cassettes to
compensate artists and producers for home taping piracy losses. This ‘home piracy’
levy system is used in Germany and France17 and in Ghana it could easily have been
extended to cover artist/producer losses not only from home taping, but also from the
cottage industry-type kiosk production of the GTRA. As it was, the GTRA was, as
mentioned, instead criminalised. Then in 1992 and with the assistance of the IFPI,18
the Copyright Administration introduced anti-piracy banderole stamps (affixed to
every legal cassette or CD). As a result, by 1993 piracy had been reduced from 90 per
cent to 15 per cent, 5.5 million banderoles had been sold, artists were selling larger
number of legal cassettes and the Internal Revenue Services were receiving money
in pre-paid taxes (a portion of the banderole fee). Indeed things seemed so fine that
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in 1996 the IFPI declared that Ghana had the second most viable music industry after
that of South Africa.19
But the price was that, under the guise of a seemingly laudable anti-piracy move
to protect the rights of artists and producers, a local cottage industry based on
an appropriate decentralised technology was nipped in the bud and 1 000 young
Ghanaian music entrepreneurs had been criminalised and so left the music sector
for other occupations. When this happened in 1990, a fifth of all the estimated music
pirates had joined the GTRA and become legal, and most certainly more would have
followed. Moreover (and in addition to the blanket licences they were paying to
local producers) some of the monies from the home-piracy-blank-cassette levy and
even the banderole stamp fee could have been paid to cover artists and producer
royalties. But in the militant battle to destroy music piracy these alternative systems
of production, more suited to the situation of Ghana in the 1980s, were sacrificed.
One of the main arguments raised by its detractors against the GTRA’s legal
‘pirate’ system was that these products were shoddy and sub-standard. Nevertheless,
as in all developing countries (including Europe during the industrial revolution)
most businesses start off in a small way, then, through market competition the
more efficient ones thrive and grow, whilst the inferior, inefficient ones go under.
This process would most certainly have occurred in Ghana, providing the country
over time with many top-rate music producers and distributors from the ranks of
the small-scale GTRA members. As it was, during the 1980s a whole generation of
young Ghanaian entrepreneurs was forced out of the music sector and a vacuum was
left in the country’s music production and distribution sector. Indeed, today there are
only a couple of local companies that produce and distribute music nationwide20 on
cassette and CD. In the meantime the banderole system collapsed in the late 1990s21
and illegal piracy (of both cassettes and CDs) is on the increase again.
What follows is a look at the reasons for the IFPI’s flurry of activity in Ghana
(and Nigeria22) from the late 1980s. In fact, it had nothing to do with helping Ghana,
but was rather a result of the antagonism of the large, established Euro-American
record companies that are based on centralised industrial plants (e.g. steam presses,
matrix cutting rooms) to the emergence of a decentralised small-scale form of music
production based on cassette technology.23 During the 1970s and 1980s this latter
system became the appropriate technology for music production in many developing
nations, including those of Africa,24 where vinyl records were either copied legally
(under licence from established companies), or illegally by music pirates, as was
more often the case. The last thing the big companies wanted was for a modality to be
worked out in a developing nation that would legitimise cassette piracy even though
they would (as licensors) have received some of the proceeds from the various kiosk
taxes and home piracy taxes gathered by the Ghanaian Copyright Administration.
As will be discussed below, the large Western music companies had a very different
solution, which was to change and recentralise the whole technological basis of
music production.
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By 1980 the answer to decentralised pirate cassette production for the big Euro-
American companies was the compact disc or CD that (at that time) needed an
expensive high-technology industrial plant to produce. Furthermore, the CD’s super
high-fidelity digital quality could not be duplicated on analogue cassette. So during
the 1980s the big record companies phased out vinyl records and introduced the CD
and at an incredibly fast and forced pace.25
A digital alternative to the CD could have been the digital cassette or DAT tape,
which the Japanese had already been developing (originally on large video-tape
format) in the 1970s. This had the same super high-fidelity as a CD; but unlike a
CD it was easy to make copies from one to another. So the Euro-American record
companies ruled this out, otherwise digital DAT technology would have, like the
earlier analogue cassette, threatened their hegemony. When the Japanese persisted
in developing DAT technology, the record companies insisted on a frequency lock
or code that would prevent DAT from being used to make multiple copies (or rather
perfect digital clones) of CDs. In short, to prevent the DAT from doing to the CD
what the cassette had done to vinyl records (i.e. make copies/clones).26
As a result of this centralising tendency of early CD technology, there are now
just four major music companies monopolising 80 percent of the planet’s commercial
music. But ironically decentralisation has come back to haunt them again as CDs
(and mini-discs) have become easy to burn and duplicate in one’s own home. Home
taping and piracy are therefore technologically viable again – not to mention the
sudden development of Napster-type software and MP3/MP4 files that make copying/
cloning music (and film) a simple process. These new developments have taken the
big record companies completely by surprise, and in the past few years they have
lost 30 per cent of the market as the public uses CD burners and the Internet to make,
swap and download commercial music.
It is difficult to guess how the big companies will face the present decentralising
challenge of CD burners, Freenet and who knows what next. Taking the Napster
company or tens of thousands of downloaders of MP3 files to court is no solution.
In light of new technologies a more sensible response would be to realise that
music manufacturing is no longer the main necessity and that record companies
should concentrate on other areas such as music management, artist and repertoire
work, promotion and distribution.
Furthermore, record companies need to develop licensing arrangements that utilise
computer technology to legalise the new music pirates by getting music downloaders
to pay royalties to the composer/publishers, the artists and the record companies.
One possibility is putting a pre-paid royalty tax on computer hardware and software
that is equivalent to the home piracy levies put on blank cassettes already used in
many counties. Another is a World-Wide Web ‘juke-box’ that encrypts music so that
one pays as one listens . Yet another is to license downloaders with an annual tax
equivalent to the radio and television licences payable in the United Kingdom, or
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Copyright, folklore and music piracy in Ghana
165
charge them through various web search engines that can pin-point the trail left by
music downloaders.27
Whatever they come up with, I hope this time round it does not result in the
distortion of the development of commercial music production in another developing
nation, as happened to Ghana during the 1980s.
The problem of applying copyright to Ghanaian folklore
Although the practice of treating anonymous works of folklore as freely available or
a common heritage for the general public is reasonable within any particular nation,
in the international context of North–South inequalities, it can justify the ‘plundering’
of the ‘free’ folklore of the developing nations by the industrial ones.
Because of this, in the 1980s the World Intellectual Property Organisation
(WIPO) recommended that, in light of the extreme economic imbalance in the world,
developing nations should nationalise their folklore in respect of its commercial
exploitation by industrial ‘First World’ nations. In short, WIPO recognised that the
world is not an equal playing-field and made some sensible recommendations to
protect and compensate developing nations whose folklore was being commercially
exploited by companies in industrialised nations.
Ghana was one the first countries to introduce legislation in line with these WIPO
recommendations and in Ghana’s 1985 Copyright Bill (PNDC Law 110) a provision
was made to collect foreign folkloric royalties. In 1991 a National Folklore Board
of Trustees was set up to make an inventory of all Ghanaian folklore and monitor its
commercial use abroad. For instance, monies were collected by the Board from the
famous American singer Paul Simon and from the Japanese company JVC. Indeed
it was the initial payment of US$16 000 to the Ghanaian Copyright Administration
by Paul Simon for his 1990 Rhythm of the saints record (released by WEA/Warner
Brothers) that was used to establish the Ghana Folklore Board.28
However, in 1996 the Folklore Board, then attached to the government’s Copyright
Administration, decided to go beyond and against the WIPO recommendation and
extend this idea of folkloric permit and tax to Ghanaians as well as foreigners, using
an ambiguity in the original Bill 110 that does not state whether the person who has
to pay the tax is a Ghanaian or not. The simple inclusion of the word ‘non-Ghanaian’
in the original 1985 Bill would have forestalled the whole idea of applying the tax/
permit internally.
The 1996 motion by the Folklore Board to extend the folkloric tax to Ghanaians
was passed, moreover, in spite of repeated objections from some Board members.
These were three voting members, namely the folk guitarist Koo Nimo, the
musicologist Professor John Collins and the poet Professor Kofi Anyidoho, and the
Board’s honorary patron Professor J. H. K.Nketia.30 In light of the Board’s 1996
decision, in 1997 the Copyright Administration went on to prepare a draft bill on
copyright in which the role of the Ghana Folklore Board and its role in issuing
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folkloric permits collecting royalties is clearly spelt out. This bill was first presented
to Parliament in 2000, but its passage was delayed due to the elections – and several
attempts have been made to present it to Parliament during the NPP government of
President Kuffour.
The new Copyright Bill (which is still before Parliament) includes clauses that
will, if passed, demand that Ghanaians obtain permission from (and pay a royalty tax
to) the government for the commercial use of their own ancestral folkloric tradition
(and indeed even all public domain material). Ghanaians who dare commercially use,
sell or distribute Ghanaian folklore or translations, adaptations and arrangements of
it without a government permit, will be fined and face up to three years in jail. This
fate will extend to any Ghanaians who bypass the government and directly tap into
local folkloric culture – be they musicians, dancers, actors, writers, poets, graphic
artists, fashion designers, painters, sculptors or local film makers.
These clauses in the new bill will create a terrible situation for the future well-
being of Ghana’s culture, which requires a constant dynamic recycling to stay alive
in the global village. And in the modern world cultural recycling also includes
commercial recycling.
This folkloric royalty tax will cause numerous problems:
1 Stunting of informal interpersonal, oral and informal cultural creativity, including
generational cultural adaptation. This tax will act as a disincentive for Ghanaian
youth to develop, recycle and commercialise their indigenous roots.
2 Government ownership of folklore vis-à-vis its own Ghanaian nationals could
also lead to possible future conflict between the central government and the
Ghanaian cultural localities as to who owns what – such as who owns the Akan
adinkra symbol – the Asanti court, or the state?
3 The taxation of Ghanaian folklore could also create legal problems across the
borders of neighbouring West African countries where there are similar or even
identical folkloric traditions. Who exactly owns the agbadza and gahu traditional
drum-dances of Ghana, Togo and Benin, or the kente cloth designs of Ghana and
Côte d’Ivoire?
4 The law is a totalitarian one that probably contravenes conventions on human
rights. For how can a democratic state own the folklore of its own people: it
can surely only be a custodian? So these folkloric clauses in the new bill, if
endorsed by Parliament, may in future touch on matters concerning the Ghana
Commission on Human Rights and Administrative Justice (CHRAJ).
5 By putting the brakes on Ghanaian folkloric development these clauses may
increase the influx of free Western cultural and folkloric norms and other
components of Western ‘cultural imperialism’ that are already flooding into
Ghana.
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However, it has not all been plain sailing for those in favour of an internal folklore
permit and tax, as a number of organisations have objected to it. These include the
Ghana Association of Composers, Authors and Performers (GHASCAP), the Ghana
Old Musicians Welfare Association (GOMAWA) and the Ghana Songwriters and
Composers Association (GSCA). Surprisingly, the majority of the new executive
of the Folklore Board (formed in 1998) have expressed reservations about a folk
tax on indigenous people and like GHASCAP and GSCA, sent these objections in
writing to the parliamentary sub-committee concerned when the new bill was first
presented.
The idea of nationalising the folk culture of developing nations (vis-à-vis
the commercial exploitation by industrialised nations) seems laudable enough,
particularly in light of possible substantial royalties accruing from the Northern
developed nations who commercially exploit the indigenous biological knowledge,
performing arts and cloth designs32 of the South. The importance of this potential
source of external revenue in the case of Ghana, is reflected by the fact that in the
late 1990s the government Copyright Administration was moved from the Ministry
of Culture (NCC) to the Ministry of Justice. However, as we have seen in Ghana, an
internalised folk tax can ‘backfire’ and easily lead to the uncontrolled bureaucratic
penetration of government copyright organisations into areas of national creative
life, where they have no right to be.
Postscript
Since this paper was written the new Copyright Bill, with its controversial folkloric
clause, was passed by the Ghanaian Parliament in late 2005. However, in early 2006
a number of groups – the most important being the Coalition of Concerned Copyright
Advocates (COCCA) – sent a petition to the Ghanaian President objecting to the fact
that Ghanaians should pay for commercially using their own folklore (and indeed
public domain works, as the new bill has also introduced the idea of a paying public
domain). As a result (and although it has already been passed) the new bill is in fact
in limbo, as President Kuffour has decided that a Legislative Instrument should first
be attached to it, to allow further public discussion. This may very well result in the
exclusion of the contentious clauses concerning permits and fees being required by
Ghanaians artists using folkloric and public domain materials. Currently (mid-2007)
many artists, music producers and local organisations like COCCA and the Institute
of Music and Development are submitting suggested amendments to the new bill,
and its modifying Legislative Instrument.
NOTES
1 Also see Collins 1991/2, 1994, 2000 and 2003.
2 Personal communication with University of Coleraine anthropologist, Simon
Harrison.
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3 See also Kenichi Tsukada (Tsukada 2004) on traditional artistic ownership concepts
amongst the Fante people of Ghana.
4 There is also the recycling and revival of old ‘folk music’ by contemporary Western
musicians who can earn royalties from new adaptations. But these adaptation royalties are
not as substantial as full copyright and do not give the contemporary ‘folk’ artist ownership
of the original work – which remains in the public domain.
5 Indeed the very (European) concept of ‘folklore’ has to be reassessed in the context
of these nations.
6 But in actual fact the author(s) of ‘traditional’ oral works can in some cases be
pinpointed. See Collins 1994 and 2000 for quoted examples by Anyidoho and Tsikata (1988),
Dekutsey (1988), Anyidoho (1983) and Okwesa (1990).
7 This is part of a larger problem of the ‘alarmist’ (Hayden 2003) and ‘paranoid’
(Sundaram n.d) attitudes of the big multinationals not only to music piracy but also to a
whole range of new developments including open-source/access publishing, open databases,
the patenting of biological information and the rise of cheap generic drugs in Third World
countries. See Cori Hayde’s SSRC Rapporteur’s Report: Open Source: A New Model for Life
Science R & D Cambridge and Berkeley Dept of Anthropology (2003) and Ravi Sundaram’s
Intellectual Property, Markets and Cultural Flows, Piracy and Informal Networks panel
report (undated).
8 Decca set up its first permanent West African recording studio in Accra in 1948 and
two locally owned pressing plants were established in the 1960s.
9 In 1975 Ambassador Records produced a thirty page catalogue of about 750 songs
by 60 local bands it had recorded/pressed (catalogue with the John Collins/BAPMAF African
popular music archives, Accra).
10 See Ghana Spectator article on the ‘Anti-piracy Task Force’ by Jerry James Lartey
of the Musicians Union of Ghana, 27 October 1990.
11 For Ghanaian newspapers on the topic see Graphic (7 June 1989), Spectator (27
October and 10 November 1990) and Mirror (24 November 1990).
12 According to Time magazine (17 July 2000) by 1999 the world-wide annual music
piracy figure was 4.1 billion dollars.
13 The NCC also replaced the Director of the Copyright Administration.
14 See Copyright News December 1990 and Spectator 29 September 1990. Indeed
by 1992 the NPPA and PPS were merged into a single association called the Association of
Recording Music Industry of Ghana (ARIGH) that was backed by the IFPI.
15 For newspaper protests see Entertainment Eye 18–25 October 1990 and Mirror 24
November 1990.
16 See Spectator 20 November 1990 and the London based West Africa magazine issues
of 29 April–5 May and 25 November–1 December 1990. In November 1993 the Director of
the Copyright Administration, Ms. Betty Mould-Idrissu, stated that 273 anti-piracy arrests
had been made.
17 In France, for instance, this money is divided 50% for the composer/publisher, 25%
for the artist and 25% for the producer.
18 According to the Ghana Showbizz paper of 14 July 1999, the IFPI helped them
find sources for manufacturing banderoles and actually placed the initial orders. Mr Andrew
Amagatcher told me (personal communication) the banderole concept was originally an
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169
IFPI suggestion which they adapted from a similar stamp used in Europe to ensure record
companies pay mechanical performing rights to their artists.
19 Graphic newspaper 2 August 1997.
20 City Rock and Bibini Records. Some of the local separatist and Pentecostal churches
also produce and distribute their own gospel music.
21 This had occurred partly due to disputes between different organisations involved in
the music industry and partly due to problems with the banderole itself, which was ultimately
found to be counterfeitable.
22 The IFPI helped establish a banderole system in Nigeria in 1993 but this was not
as successful as it was in Ghana. It later collapsed and Nigeria reverted to a 90% cassette
piracy rate.
23 Ironically, cassette technology was pioneered in the 1960s by one of the multi-
national record companies, Phillips. But Phillips never realised that in the hands of the
Japanese (Sony, etc) their low-fidelity ferric oxide tape would become the high-fidelity
chrome oxide version of the Japanese that could compete in sound quality with hi-fi vinyl
records.
24 For instance Liberia, Mali, Senegal, Niger, Benin, Togo, Sudan, Ethiopia, Uganda,
Tanzania and Zimbabwe never had any vinyl record-making capacity. Ghana and Nigeria
did have these capabilities, but they declined due to the general economic collapse of these
countries in the late seventies and mid-eighties respectively.
25 Between 1984 and 1990 world sales of vinyl dropped from 54 to 24 million units
whilst CDs increased from 900 000 to 50 million (UK Guardian newspaper 8 March 1991).
26 The major American record companies were so nervous of the Japanese DAT
machine that in 1991 they successfully lobbied their government to prevent the importation
of DATs: to which Sony responded by buying up a major American company (Columbia
Records), thus by-passing the import ban.
27 Examples of web search-engines are the Broadcast Music Inc. BOT system and the
Digital Rights System. Electronic ‘juke-box’ solutions include BMG’s Jupiter Communication
and the Secure Digital Music Initiative of the Recording Industry Association of America.
28 The song was entitled ‘Spirit Voices’ and was partly based on the melody of an old
Ghanaian highlife tune ‘Yaa Amponsah’. By the late nineties Paul Simon had paid $80 000
to the Folklore Board.
29 For instance the 1989 WIPO report on the ‘Protection of Expression of Folklore’
makes it quite clear (pages 10,11) that the protection/taxation of the folklore of developing
nations should only apply ‘outside the country or origin’. It was never meant to be applied
internally.
30 In a speech at a National Commission on Culture/Folklore Board Seminar in
Tamale in August 1994, he was particularly concerned with the potential impact of such an
internal folkloric tax leading to tensions between the central state and the local communities
over the ownership of folklore.
31 Akan stamp designs, printed on cloth, are linked to traditional royalty.
32 Ghanaian (or rather Asante and Ewe) kente cloth designs have found a wide
commercial international market as an ‘Afrocentric’ icon.
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