COSON SET FOR A YEAR OF BOLD CONSOLIDATION

Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON), the nation’s sole copyright collective management organization for musical works and sound recordings, is set to make 2015 a critical year in its evolution and growth. As a result, the organization has spent much of the month of January scrutinizing and reviewing its processes and redesigning its approaches going forward.

Speaking on the society’s approach in 2015, COSON General Manager, Mr. Chinedu Chukwuji said, “January has been a month of management meetings and meetings at COSON. There have been several meetings with our Legal team, several with our Communications team and more meetings with our Licensing team. We still have meetings with our Finance and Administration teams. Each meeting has been a strategy session chaired by our chairman, Chief Tony Okoroji.  The discussions have been intense. Some of the discussions have sometimes continued far into the night. The chairman has been emphatic about the level of results which would not be acceptable to the members of the society in 2015. We have strategized on ways to hit those results that will make our members happy. The Chairman has also made it clear that COSON must continue to operate at the cutting edge of technology and the most modern management principles and practices. As a result, all the departments have been primed to ensure the wide collection of information and statistics that would boost their databases as COSON will not make decisions based on guess work”.

In May 2015, COSON will be celebrating the fifth anniversary of its approval by the government of the Federal Republic of Nigeria as the nation’s sole collective management organization for musical works and sound recordings. Said Mr. Chukwuji, ‘Despite the initial challenges, COSON has grown to become Nigeria’s most powerful organization in the creative sector with a management style and structure that most blue chip organizations envy. We have distributed royalties every year since our approval. With reciprocal representation agreements covering about 130 collective management organizations across the world, we have spread our tentacles beyond what anyone could have imagined four and half years ago. Without one kobo received from the government, I am happy to say that COSON is financially and organizationally very stable. Every COSON member is important to the society; we observe every rule in the book and our internal democracy is second to

none. At COSON, whatever money belongs to you will get to you ultimately. We do not joke at all about transparency and accountability’

Mr. Chukwuji says that 2015 will be a year of bold consolidation at COSON. According to the Masters in Intellectual Property (MIP) graduate of Africa University, Zimbabwe, ‘last year, COSON signed a historic agreement with the entire broadcasting industry in Nigeria. The year before, we reached such an agreement with the hotel industry. We hope to enter into a similar agreement with the transport industry this year and finally bring the private copy levy scheme to operation. We hope that in 2015, those who have an obligation to obtain licences from COSON will do so without any confrontation.  I however promise anyone who wants to fight COSON in 2015 that at COSON, we are not afraid of a fight’