Safaricom and Jamii Telecom will pivot back to the Court of Appeal in a case in which they are accused of failing to take down or block copyrighted content that their users access or stream on their networks.
This is after Parliament dropped planned amendments to the Copyright Act of 2019 which introduced take-down notices for ISPs and other networks for content that was illegally downloaded or accessed via their networks.
The clauses require that upon notice by the copyright or broadcast rights holder, the ISP should take down the offending content or block access to it. Failing this, the ISP is to face liability for breaching intellectual property rights.
This is where the two Kenyan telcos find themselves after they were sued by broadcast content distributor, Multichoice Kenya, for failing to prevent illegal access to sports content that the company has exclusive broadcast rights to.
If the amendments to Section 35B, C and D of the Act had gone through, then the telcos would have been freed from this liability and the said case would be moot. However Parliament dropped the amendments amidst fierce lobbying by industry bodies, creatives and sports rights holders.
“The amendments are not progressive, they are retrogressive therefore we cannot carry them in a bill that is meant to protect artists,” MP Gladys Wanga, who had proposed the amendments, told the MPs during the Committee of the Whole House.
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