Kenya’s High Court has barred the Music Copyright Society of Kenya from collecting a single royalty, in a ruling that leaves thousands of Kenyan songwriters without a functioning collecting society while the actual legal question in dispute, whether they should have lost their society in the first place, still has not been heard. The restraint, ordered on 18 August 2026, closes nearly a year of licensing refusal, tribunal defeat and interlocutory court fights for MCSK. It does not close the underlying case.
How a collecting society loses its licence#
In Kenya, collective management organisations do not operate on an open-ended charter. Section 46 of the Copyright Act requires them to hold a licence from the Kenya Copyright Board, KECOBO, renewed on a cycle the regulator sets. On 4 September 2025, KECOBO invited applications for the licensing period beginning 5 November 2025. Six organisations applied, among them MCSK, the body that has represented Kenyan composers, songwriters and music publishers since 1983, and collected royalties on their behalf for over four decades.
On 14 October 2025, KECOBO’s Board of Directors, chaired by Hon. Joshua Kutuny, resolved to licence only two applicants: KAMP Copyright and Related Rights Limited and the Performing and Audio-Visual Rights Society of Kenya, PAVRISK. Both cover neighbouring rights, the royalties owed to performers and producers on sound recordings, not the musical-works royalties owed to songwriters and composers. MCSK was not licensed. KECOBO’s own public resolution gives no reasons specific to MCSK’s application; it simply does not appear among the two approved.
What MCSK actually failed to provide has mostly come from court filings rather than from KECOBO’s public statement. In an affidavit filed in the case that eventually produced this month’s ruling, PAVRISK’s chief executive, Joseph Njagi, told the court the deficiencies behind MCSK’s rejection included a failure to submit audited financial statements, a failure to submit annual returns, and a failure to pay prescribed statutory fees, all conditions under the Copyright (Collective Management) Regulations, 2020.
Two different court fights, often reported as one#
MCSK’s response split into two separate legal tracks that have frequently been conflated in coverage of this dispute.
The first came from MCSK’s own members, not the society itself. A constitutional petition filed on their behalf at the High Court in Lodwar won interim orders on 5 November 2025 blocking enforcement of the non-renewal. KECOBO moved to have those orders discharged, and on 21 January 2026, Justice PJO Otieno ruled that the petition was, in his words, a disguised appeal against KECOBO’s licensing decision. Section 48(4)(b)(i) of the Copyright Act sends challenges to a CMO licensing refusal to the Copyright Tribunal, not the High Court by way of a constitutional petition, and the judge struck the case out for want of jurisdiction. He added, separately, that the dispute had become moot because the 2025/2026 licence year the petition concerned had already lapsed.
The second track was MCSK’s own, and it is the one that produced this month’s collection ban. MCSK had already appealed KECOBO’s refusal to the Copyright Tribunal, the body Parliament actually designated to hear such appeals. On 17 November 2025, the Tribunal dismissed MCSK’s appeal and affirmed KECOBO’s decision. MCSK then took that loss to the High Court at Nairobi, lodging Civil Appeal No. E077 of 2025 against the Tribunal’s judgment.
What actually happened on 18 August 2026#
Pending that appeal, MCSK asked the Nairobi court twice to let it keep operating: a motion dated 10 December 2025 seeking a stay of KECOBO’s decision and an injunction protecting its royalty collection, and a second motion dated 14 January 2026 seeking a priority hearing after MCSK grew concerned that a 21 July 2026 hearing date would leave its members exposed in the meantime. KECOBO filed its own motion on 27 January 2026, asking the court to go the other way entirely and restrain MCSK from collecting anything at all while the appeal was pending.
Hon. L.P. Kassan heard all three together and ruled on 18 August 2026, in a decision this desk obtained directly from Kenya Law and read in full. The reasoning turned on a point of procedure as much as substance. A stay, the court held, suspends the execution of a positive order; the Tribunal had merely dismissed MCSK’s appeal, a negative order with nothing left to execute, so there was nothing capable of being stayed. That line of authority traces back to a 1976 Court of Appeal case, Western College of Arts and Applied Sciences v Oranga, and the court applied it without much difficulty.
The injunction MCSK sought in the alternative fared no better, but for a different reason. The court reasoned that letting MCSK keep collecting while its appeal was pending would hand it, in practical terms, the equivalent of the very licence KECOBO and the Tribunal had both already refused. Kenya’s courts, the judge held, should be slow to grant an interlocutory order that effectively licenses an entity the regulator has declined to license, especially where the lawfulness of that refusal is the exact question still before the appellate court. MCSK’s second motion, about the July hearing date, was dismissed as moot once the main motion was decided.
KECOBO’s countermotion succeeded. The court’s order restrains MCSK, and anyone acting under its authority, from holding itself out as a licensed collective management organisation, or from collecting, demanding, invoicing, receiving or levying royalties anywhere a section 46 licence is legally required, until the appeal is finally determined. MCSK was ordered to bear the costs of its two failed applications. Costs on KECOBO’s successful one will follow the result of the appeal itself.
What the ruling pointedly does not decide#
Courts issuing interlocutory orders in Kenya are generally careful to say what they have not decided, and Justice Kassan’s ruling is unusually direct on the point. The judgment states plainly that nothing in it should be read as a finding that KECOBO’s decision, or the Tribunal’s judgment affirming it, is actually correct. That question, whether MCSK was lawfully excluded at all, remains open and was still waiting to be heard as of the ruling’s own closing lines, which directed Kenya’s court registry to prioritise the appeal record and list the case for an expedited hearing.
The ruling is equally careful about what it does not touch. It does not extinguish or even address the proprietary and contractual rights individual composers and publishers may hold, whether against MCSK itself or against the broadcasters, venues and platforms that use their music. A songwriter’s ownership of a composition is untouched by any of this. What has been suspended is MCSK’s statutory authority to act as the collection vehicle for that ownership.
What this means for artists#
For the composers, songwriters and publishers who have relied on MCSK, the practical effect is straightforward and uncomfortable: there is currently no body with a live mandate to collect their musical-works royalties in Kenya. KAMP and PAVRISK were licensed in October 2025, but both operate on the neighbouring-rights side of Kenyan copyright, performers’ and producers’ royalties on sound recordings, a different right from the performing and mechanical royalties owed to the people who wrote the songs. Neither KECOBO’s own public resolution nor the August 2026 ruling states that either body has been authorised to step into MCSK’s specific role.
That leaves a real question this record cannot answer: who, if anyone, is collecting musical-works royalties in Kenya right now, and what happens to money that would have flowed through MCSK while its appeal sits in the court’s case-management queue. Separately, Kenyan trade press reported in February 2026 that an earlier High Court ruling had already stopped MCSK from collecting; this desk could not locate that specific judgment and continues to treat that report as unverified. What is now verified, directly, is that as of 18 August 2026, MCSK cannot lawfully touch a royalty, and the court that said so has not yet ruled on whether it was right to say it.
This record will be updated if the substantive appeal in Civil Appeal No. E077 of 2025 is heard and decided, or if any Kenyan CMO is shown to have taken over musical-works collection in MCSK’s place.
