First it was war over hakuna matata rights and now we have been played again with our own national anthem.
The Kenya Copyright Board (KECOBO) was on Tuesday thrust into the spotlight for apparently leaving the country’s National Anthem vulnerable and subject to copyright claim by other international entities.
This came after a Kenyan YouTuber’s video ranking the continent’s best national anthems which included Kenya’s was flagged down over copyright infringement.
The content creator who runs the ‘2nacheki’ channel claimed he was informed that AdRev Publishing had registered the complaint on behalf of De Wolfe Music; a British company which, as it emerges, owns the rights to the Kenyan National Anthem.
A search on De Wolfe’s website, however, reveals that they have only copyrighted an arrangement/instrumental of the Kenyan national anthem, as opposed to the one which had been published by ‘2nacheki’ in which there is an actual choir singing along.
In a statement released following the furore, KECOBO has since acknowledged that “the government has copyright for its commissioned works for up to 50 years,” which, in the case of the National Anthem, reportedly lapsed in 2013 and was never reviewed.