Zambia’s draft Copyright and Related Rights Bill 2025 would replace the country’s member-formed music society with a state-chartered body, and one clause in it, Section 70(4), tells members they may not exercise their own rights while they belong to it. For any Zambian writer or label with a distribution agreement, that is the sentence that matters.
The bill is published by PACRA, the Patents and Companies Registration Agency, which administers copyright in Zambia. Its memorandum, signed by Attorney-General M. D. Kabesha, states the objects plainly: repeal and replace the Copyright and Performance Rights Act of 1994, and provide for the collective management of copyright and related rights.
What the bill actually builds
Part VII establishes the Rights Management Society of Zambia as a body corporate. Not a licensing regime for competing societies, which is the direction several African reforms have taken. One statutory society.
Section 62 sets its board, and every member is appointed by the Minister, with the Registrar as chairperson. Six of the eleven seats sit with government: the Registrar, the Attorney-General’s representative, and representatives of the ministries responsible for commerce, information and media, arts, and home affairs. Four go to registered associations for musical, audio-visual, literary and broadcasting works.
Section 61(j) then gives the Society an explicit function to encourage Zambian rightsholders who belong to a foreign collective management organisation, or CMO, to move their membership across. If your writer share sits with a society abroad, you are a named target of the statute.
The clause that reaches your distribution deal
Section 70(4) reads: “A member of the Society shall not individually exercise the rights of that member during the period that the member is a member of the Society.”
Read literally, that is blanket exclusivity with no carve-out for the making-available right. Signing a distribution agreement is an individual exercise of rights. So is a sync licence.
It sits awkwardly against Section 67(a), which gives a member the right to authorise the Society for specific categories of rights or specific types of works. Two provisions in the same Part point in opposite directions, and that gap is fixable in one sentence of drafting.
Section 66(2) adds a practical condition: the Society manages your economic rights only where you deposited the work with it on application. No deposit, no claim.
The money rules are not in the Act
Section 68(4)(a) lets the board deduct management fees “as may be determined by the Board.” There is no statutory ceiling. Section 69 says royalties are paid “as prescribed under the rules of the Society,” so the distribution rule is internal policy rather than law.
The audit side is stronger. The First Schedule puts the accounts under the Auditor General annually and requires an annual report within ninety days of the financial year end.
The consultation is still live. IFRRO wrote on 22 January 2026 that it and CISAC had filed joint observations, and a further submission from the Centre on Knowledge Governance, IFLA and EIFL was lodged on 30 March 2026. The published PDF still carries Word template text in its marginal notes, which tells you how far from final it is.
What to do before the Society exists
- Scope your membership authorisation in writing under Section 67(a): public performance and broadcast only, with mechanical and making-available rights retained by your distributor.
- Ask for the board’s fee schedule before depositing anything. Nothing in the Act caps it.
- Get ISRC and ISWC codes on every work now. A deposit-based society pays on matched metadata, and unmatched repertoire is already the failure point.
- If you hold a foreign society affiliation, document it. Section 61(j) creates pressure to switch, not an obligation.
For scale: ZAMCOPS has collected since 1996 and distributes once a year, and a Music In Africa piece by Lunga Sianagowa in May 2016 put its roll at “over 1000 members on paper.” It moved to audio fingerprinting for radio monitoring only in February 2025, via ACRCloud. Meanwhile DataReportal counted 7.29 million Zambian internet users at 33 percent penetration in a population of 22.1 million with a median age of 17.9. The broadcast pipe this Society is built to license is not where that audience is.
Which is the strategic point. A statutory CMO collects public performance money inside Zambia. Streaming income from Boomplay, Audiomack, Mdundo, Spotify and YouTube arrives through your distributor, on DDEX, which means Digital Data Exchange, the delivery standard DSPs read splits from. Keep the two pipes separate in writing and the bill costs you nothing.
Related reading: Top Music Distribution Platforms for Zambian Artists, Malawi’s biggest music royalty payout, and Sub-Saharan Africa’s 120 million dollar music market.
