Ghana music rights organization(Ghamro) administrator; Agya Abraham has vindicated award winning sound engineer Appietus and entertainment personality Rossy over who owns the copyright of a beat Appietus produced to an underground artiste Sariki.
It would be recalled that, Sariki formerly known as Bossu and Famous had accused Appietus of selling the beat the latter sold to him for 2500 GHC in 2014 to Nero X.
According to Sariki, immidiately the beat was recorded, he recorded a song which featured Obrafour and Don Itchy.But since Obrafour was busy, they didn’t have the time to shoot a music video for the song which they had wanted to release alongside the video.
He emphasized that, after securing a slot on Obrafour’s calendar to shoot the video this year, much to his chagrin,he got a hint that Appietus had released a compilation album on which the same beat he sold to him was given to Nero X for his ‘Odo Asem’song .
Sariki then labelled Appietus a fraudster and also reiterated the need for the latter to at least apologize to him.
Explaining his side of the story, Appietus who spoke in a telephone conversation with KMJ,host of ‘Day Break’ entertainment show on Hitz 103.9FM delineated that, Act 690 section 5 of the copy right law states candidly that, as a producer, he owns the rights of the beat.
He added that,when you record a song for an artiste and the artiste doesn’t release it, after a year you can sell the beat to another person.
The celebrated sound engineer then made a reference of how the New Patriotic Party (NPP) went into agreement with him in order to own the beat of their ‘Nana Y3 Winner’ campaign song for eight years which he charged the party extra money based on the agreement.
As a pundit on the show, Rossy who was deliberating her view on the issue vindicated Appietus by indicating that there is actually a law like that which binds Appietus as the owner of the beat.She then argued that its totally absurd for an upcoming artist like Sariki to tell Appietus to apologize to him, hence he is ignorant of the law.
Rossy’s assertion attracted elephantine criticisms from the callers of the show who tilted her as ignorant of the law and not worthy to be a pundit on the show.
But speaking in an exclusively interview via telephone with Razzonline.com, the Ghamro administrator Agya Abraham vindicated Rossy and Appietus by accentuating categorically that truly Act 690 section 5 of the Copy right law makes Appietus the rightful owner of the beat thus Sariki is rather ignorant of the law:
“For you to understand, note 3 things..1.The law..Act 690 Section 5 says that only the owner of a work who can make money out of the work, it is only the owner of a work who can make changes..we call it modification, it is only the owner of a work who can reproduce the work, it is only the owner of the work who can communicate the work to the public…so even if the radio stations want to play they must seek his consent .
The second thing is industry norm…and the norm is that God didn’t bless everyone with voice so there are some people who were given voices, there are some people who were given the talent to write songs, there are some people their only talent is to arrange songs but they can’t really write so a song like Serwaa Akoto was sang by Agya Aku but the original composer of the song is CK Yamoah so the song doesn’t belong to Agya Aku..so what am saying is even outside you will see that when you look at Beyonce and some other people the owner of the song is different from the singer.
The last factor is what we call work on hire or commission work…so everything that goes on razz online ,even though Reagan writes them,Reagan does everything but its owned by razz online.. do you now understand? so the key is what agreement is situated between Reagan and razz online so that you will know that you are being paid for what you are doing otherwise your stories are going out but you are not gaining anything but only razz online is getting everything…Now lets come to Appietus issue…Appietus is one of the greatest music composers and is also a studio engineer, by that Appietus is what we call in copy right an arranger of songs, and then Appietus also owns a studio so Appietus is playing 3 roles…So what did you go to Appietus to do? if you go to Appietus with your body and you tell Appietus I want to sing I have some words, you are only giving him words…alot of the musicians have voices and can think about words …now who puts the rhythm and the sound around it?Appietus then puts beat around the words…so this is called a joint work…so Sariki went to the studio with words…who created the beat?is Appietus…but I don’t blame Sariki because he is ignorant of the law”,Agya Abraham revealed to Razzonline.com.
