Trinidad and Tobago changed the arithmetic on every calypso, soca and chutney copyright it holds, and it did it six days before Carnival.
The Copyright (Amendment) Bill, 2026 passed the Senate on 3 February, cleared the House of Representatives on 6 February, was assented to on 11 February and appeared in the Gazette the next day as Act No. 3 of 2026.
The whole Act runs to seven operative sections. Almost every one does the same thing: delete the word fifty, write in seventy.
What Act No. 3 of 2026 actually changed
From the enacted text, amending the Copyright Act, Chap. 82:80:
- Section 19: an author’s economic rights move from life plus 50 years to life plus 70.
- Section 19A: moral rights now run 70 years from the end of the year the performance was fixed.
- Section 21(4): fifty becomes seventy.
- Section 22(2): a producer’s rights in a sound recording run 70 years from publication, or from fixation if the recording was never published.
- Section 23(4): the right to equitable remuneration moves onto the same 70-year clock.
- Section 24(2): broadcasts stay at 50 years. The subsection was rewritten and the number did not move.
That last line is the one worth sitting with. Authors, performers and producers got another two decades. Broadcasting organisations got a tidier sentence.
The right that actually pays a soca record
Neighbouring rights means the cluster of rights sitting next to the songwriting copyright: the performer’s right in a performance, the producer’s right in a sound recording, and the broadcaster’s right in a broadcast. TTCO sets out that three-way split plainly.
Section 23 is the money section. It is the equitable remuneration right, the payment owed when a commercially published recording is broadcast or played in public. Radio, fetes, hotels, taxis, tents.
Under the old text that right expired 50 years after publication. It now runs 70. The published text contains no clause reviving terms that had already lapsed, so this is a forward extension on catalogue still inside its window in February.
Two organisations, one extended right
COTT, incorporated on 10 July 1984 and describing itself as the first national collective management organisation in the Caribbean, licenses performing and reproduction rights in compositions. It also runs a neighbouring rights scheme for producers and performers.
TTCO, the Trinidad and Tobago Copyright Collection Organisation, states a remit covering performances, sound recordings and broadcasts.
Two bodies publish neighbouring rights pages for the same territory. An artist who assumes that registering with one covers the other is guessing. The Dominican Republic spent years in court over a comparable question.
A longer term is only worth the paperwork behind it
Twenty extra years is an asset that pays out to whoever can prove ownership decades from now. Practically, for a Trinidadian rights owner:
- Register the composition and the recording separately. Different rights, different clocks, different societies.
- Put an ISRC on every master. ISRC means International Standard Recording Code, the identifier that ties a specific recording to its owners across every platform and society.
- Get splits in writing before release, not after the tune charts.
- Pair domestic registration with an administrator that collects abroad. SoundExchange said on 9 February 2026 that new pacts, including one with Barbados’ COSCAP, pushed its coverage past 91 percent of the available global neighbouring rights market.
- Keep distributor royalty reporting that shows the ownership chain, because in 2070 that documentation is the claim.
Most Caribbean recording income already leaves the island before it comes back, a pattern Jamaica knows well.
Carnival did not wait for the law
Six days after assent, Machel Montano took his twelfth Road March title with “Encore,” played 171 times during judging, ahead of Voice’s “Cyah Behave” on 127 and Bunji Garlin’s “Still a Road Man” on 97. He passed Lord Kitchener’s record of eleven.
Kitchener’s catalogue is precisely the body of work a 70-year term is written for, and soca’s earning window no longer closes in February. Whether the extension pays anyone in 2070 is a documentation question, not a legislative one.
