Highlife musician and lead for creatives in the National Democratic Congress (NDC), Rex Omar, has reiterated the party’s willingness to lay down better plans for creatives’ intellectual property.

According to him the royalty system in Ghana has been defective due to the absence of a law that will stipulate the exact amount of money to be paid for people’s intellectual property.

Speaking at Joy FM’s Manifesto Debate on Creative Economy, he said his party will make sure the law is passed if voted into power.

“Right now the issue of collective management organisations is not about the organisations themselves. It is about the enforcement of music users paying for what is right.

There is no law that stipulates how much every music user (ie media houses) must pay based on duration. That is the issue. So for example if Multimedia has played 100,000 minutes you cannot say just because they have played such number of times they should pay such an amount times 100,000 minutes. So we are [currently] using flat rate,” he told the host Kwame Dadzie.

Rex Omar therefore intimated that this problem will be solved if the National Democratic wins power after the December 7, 2024 elections.

“We saying that when the NDC comes to power, we will come out with a legislation to be clear as to how much a music user must pay. That is what happens all over the world,” he said.

The copyright office of Ghana is represented by three collective management organisations: Ghana Music Rights Organisations (GHAMRO), Audiovisual Rights Society of Ghana (ARSOG) and CopyGhana which caters for the literary creatives.

Over the years, a lot of creatives have remonstrated little or no royalties due to poor systems and structures.

The 5th edition of Joy FM’s Showbiz Roundtable brought some of these issues up during its Manifesto Debate on Creative Economy which was involved the National Democratic Congress and the New Patriotic Party.

Speaking for the National Democratic Congress (NDC) were Sadiq Abdullai Abu (NDC Parliamentary Candidate for Okaikoi Central Constituency) and Rex Owusu Marfo (Member of NDC Manifesto Committee).

The New Patriotic Party (NPP) was represented by the Deputy Minister of Tourism, Arts and Culture, Mark Okraku-Mantey and the Chief Executive Officer of the Ghana Tourism Authority (GTA), Akwasi Agyeman.

source:myjoyonline.com