Chris-Vincent Agyapong Febiri, Editor of GhanaCelebrities.Com‘s take on the issue…
It’s pretty interesting how we disregard the law in Ghana—and the Charter House and Sarkodie’s on-going issue is just a reflection of the bigger societal problem we have.
People take whatever they want and use it however they want; be it intellectual property or real property of another.
In the Sarkodie’s case, Charter House’s usage of his name in their commercial when they had not paid or hired him for such a performance breaches both his statutory right of publicity and his common law invasion of privacy right.
It’s interesting how this is playing out on twitter—if it was in the United States or United Kingdom, the artiste would be in court, seeking for the appropriate damages.
If a big event company such as Charter House does not really give a hoot about what the law says at any point in time, what do you expect the smaller event organisers to do—and more also, are they not the same organisation in court seeking to have the law in action in relation to the Shatta Wale’s defamation case?
That is the sort of irony grounded in the way Charter House seems to be operating. There is law to enforce when someone violates one in relation to them but they seem to continue to violate the same law (in other form) when dealing with others.
All around the world, the law is pretty simple on this; “a person shall not use any aspect of an individual’s persona for a commercial purpose…The person’s persona could include his or her name, voice, signature, photograph, image, likeness, or distinctive appearance, if any of these aspects have commercial value”.
In Ghana, the right of publicity also known as personality rights which grants every person a right to control the commercial use of his or her name, image, likeness, or other unequivocal aspects of his identity continues to be violated from the bottom to the top.
Can you count the number of barbershops using rapper-Ludacris’ photo? None of them have a permission to use this—and since such usage is not covered by fair usage, they are all breaking the law.
We do not see anything wrong with this at the bottom and as such, those at the top also regard it trivial to say you will be performing at an event when they do not have a contract with you or have not really compensated you in anyway.
We say the Government is corrupt—but as I said in my recent article, “the ordinary Ghanaian is the mother lode of corrupt practices.”
Talented Ghanaian rapper has been doing a lot of tweeting today—and this follows his tweets yesterday which he used literally used to call Ghana Music Awards’ organisers-Charter House, CHEATS.
Many have been wondering what the heck the problem is with Charter House and Sarkodie and for the last 2 hours, the musician has been running some sort of live feed on his sentiment—explaining how bad Charter House has dealt with him and how bad they continue to deal with him and other artistes.
For the many years that Charter House as a company has been organizing the Ghana Music Awards, they seem to be repeating the same mistakes—and bending bridges with artistes, though they continue to make huge profits off the back of these artistes.
Of course, certain artistes have spoken against Charter House and their way of doing business—both respectfully and disrespectfully. Most of these artistes who come up against the dealings of Charter House get shunned or somehow, they managed to settle things.
For Sarkodie, when he thought he had settled things with Charter House—they’ve repeated it and he couldn’t hold it than to take to twitter and put them on BLAST.
Sarkodie must really be upset to be writing so much…
Flip to the nextpage to read all Sarkodie’s tweets…
Hmmm Ghana for you too many crooks
Liked the fact that he went on that twitter rant; it’s abt time sme event organizers took “some GH” Artists serious
Shatta Wale, come take your stone