A court battle is ensuing between Telecommunications giant Safaricom and Musican Timson Kuria alias Bamboo over unpaid ‘royalties’ for the last five years.
According to Bamboo who appeared before a Nairobi court Thursday Safaricom and another company used three of his songs without his permission.
While testifying Bamboo revealed the three songs included; Mama Africa, Yes Indeed and Move on.
Unlike the title of the latter, he says that he can not move on and that he demands payment for what is rightfully his.
“I want them to pay all the money they collected by suing my music for 5 years in Skiza Tune without authority,” he said.
Through his legal counsel the musician now wants the three companies, Safaricom PLC, Bernsoft Limited and Mtech communications Limited to present in court. all accounts and records of all the sales proceeds realized from the sale and download of his three musical works.
The companies are said to have used his music without consent and evenly jointly reproduced, published, broadcasted, distributed, exhibited, sold and commercially benefited from it by uploading it on the Safaricom Skiza Tune platform.
Appearing before justice Joseph Sergon, Bamboo said that he had suffered loss of revenue arising from the inability to assign the rights infringed by the three companies to other parties.
“I lost the exclusive right to control and license the production of my music work despite using a lot of resources and time to produce them,” he said.
The court was informed that the musical works were being downloaded at a cost of 75 Cents per song from Safaricom portal.
This is said to have persisted between 2009 to 2014 when Safaricom removed it from its platform following a demand and notice to sue served to the company by the musician.
A plaint presented by Bamboo to the courts claimed that Safaricom had acknowledged having hosted the said works on its platform but denied liability for the infringement insisting that it has received three songs from the other two companies.
The matter is still be fore the court.
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