In July 2009 the Fela Anikulapo-Kuti album catalogue was put up as collateral. Two short-form copyright mortgages covering the recordings were recorded at the United States Copyright Office the following year, and between them they schedule the catalogue by name: Zombie, Shakara, Gentleman, Expensive Shit, Kalakuta Show, Coffin For Head Of State, Beasts Of No Nation, Original Sufferhead, Teacher Don’t Teach Me Nonsense, I.T.T., Underground System. Fifty-three works on one document, fifty-two on the other.
Nothing was sold. A copyright mortgage is security for an obligation, not a transfer of title, and the catalogue’s ownership position is unchanged: the masters belong to the Estate of Fela Anikulapo-Kuti and are licensed out. What the documents establish is the layer nobody reports: who financed the reissue campaign that put Fela back into shops and streaming services, and what they took as comfort.
What the two documents say#
The first is document number V3589D439, recorded on 24 March 2010, two recorded pages. The second is V3591D680, recorded on 14 July 2010, three recorded pages. Both are executed “as of 6Jul09”. Both name the same two parties: MRI Associated Labels, Inc. and Knitting Factory Entertainment, Inc. d.b.a. Knitting Factory Entertainment. Both carry the same note from the register: “Short-form copyright mortgage. Exhibit C recorded at request of sender.”
The Copyright Office classifies both as security interests. The schedules run from the Koola Lobitos material and the 1969 Los Angeles sessions through the entire Afrika 70 and Egypt 80 run. The second document also lists three works that have nothing to do with Fela: Put In Pencil by Taha Rachid, and Chase The Devil and The Edge Of Heaven by Gary Lucas.
Who took the security, and who gave it#
The register gives “Party 1” and “Party 2” and does not say which granted the mortgage and which took it. What follows is an inference, not a quotation.
MRI Associated Labels, Inc. appears on exactly six recorded documents at the Copyright Office. All six are security interests, all six were recorded in 2010, and on all six MRI is Party 1. The Party 2 position is filled by three unrelated American independent labels: Knitting Factory Entertainment twice, on the Fela documents; Partisan Records Corporation twice, over a schedule headed “Decline of the West”; and Instinct Records Corporation twice, over schedules of 75 and 98 titles. The two Partisan documents and the two Instinct documents are both executed “as of 1Mar10”.
One party taking identically structured security over the catalogues of three different labels inside a single year is consistent with one reading. MRI was the secured party. The labels were the mortgagors. No document says so, and the underlying instruments were not obtained, so that is where the claim stops.
A licensee can only mortgage what it has#
This is the distinction music people get wrong most often. Knitting Factory did not own the Fela recordings in 2009 and does not own them now. The masters sit with the Estate, and the official Fela Kuti site states that the Kuti family has partnered with Knitting Factory Entertainment and Partisan Records to reissue the catalogue since 2008. That is a licence, not ownership. A licensee cannot mortgage a copyright it has never held. What it can mortgage is its own interest: the licence, the income due under it, and the product made under it.
The recorded pages do not say which of those was charged. The register note points to an Exhibit C, which is where the charged property is actually defined, and that exhibit was not obtained. So the claim here is narrow: the catalogue was scheduled as collateral in a recorded security instrument. It is not accurate to say the copyrights were encumbered, and this desk does not say it.
The release that was never recorded#
A recorded security interest stays on the register until somebody records a release against it. Sixteen years on, nobody has. A recordation search for Knitting Factory Entertainment returns two documents and only two, and they are these. There is no third.
That is not proof a debt is outstanding. Parties discharge secured obligations all the time without filing the release, and the Copyright Office does not chase anyone. But it is the state of the public record, which is what a catalogue fund, a bank or an acquirer searches before writing a cheque. Anyone running diligence on the Fela recordings today finds a live, unreleased security interest sitting on top of them.
A second charge, in London, in 2024#
The exclusive licence now sits in Kalakuta Sunrise Limited, an English company incorporated on 29 October 2010 with a registered office in St John’s Wood. On 10 May 2024 it created a charge in favour of Coutts & Company, delivered to the registrar three days later under charge code 0742 3466 0001. The register describes it as containing fixed charges, containing floating charges over all the property or undertaking of the company, and containing a negative pledge. A negative pledge is the clause that stops the company granting further security to anyone else without the lender’s consent.
On 12 June 2026 Coutts filed a statement of satisfaction recording the charge as satisfied in full. It was the company’s only charge. What was under the fixed charge is not on the public record. Pages three to eight of the filed instrument are scanned images from which no text can be extracted, and the filing carries a certification that material was redacted under section 859G of the Companies Act 2006. So it cannot be said that the Fela masters were charged to Coutts, and that is not said here. What can be said is that the licence holder borrowed against its property and undertaking for two years, with a British private bank holding a negative pledge throughout.
The vehicle was a New York LLC first#
Kalakuta Sunrise LLC was filed as a New York limited liability company on 7 April 2009, in Westchester County, with a process address of 10 Dundee Road, Larchmont, New York. That is the same address the English company records at Companies House for its sole person with significant control, Mr Stephen Hendel, notified on 6 April 2016.
The chronology is tidy: the New York vehicle in April 2009, the mortgages in July 2009, the English company in October 2010, seven months after the first mortgage was recorded. Two of that company’s current directors, appointed together on 21 August 2019, both give a correspondence address at 281 N 7th St in Brooklyn, the Williamsburg address the American labels on those 2010 documents share. Those two companies later licensed Femi Kuti and Mádé Kuti recordings into Nigeria.
The songs are a different chain, and it runs through France#
Everything above is about sound recordings. The compositions are somewhere else entirely. Ninety composition registrations in Fela’s name at the same Copyright Office carry Clouseau Musique, S.A. as copyright claimant, filed in four batches: November 1984, August 1985, April 1986, and a large group on 2 February 1998, six months after his death. Several name a joint claimant, “Boucharlat, SA, Clouseau Musique”.
One recorded document sits on that chain: V2304P715, recorded 9 December 1987, between Clouseau Musique, S.A. and Yaba Musique, S.A.R.L., covering Water No Get Enemy, No Buredi, Unnecessary Begging and Expensive Shit. S.A. and S.A.R.L. are French corporate forms and the descriptions are in French. Who controls those companies today was not established: no French register was reached.
What this means for artists#
First, a licence you grant can be pledged by the person you granted it to. You keep your copyright, which is real and worth something. But the licensee’s interest in your catalogue is an asset on its balance sheet, and it can be charged to a lender without your involvement and without any announcement. If that financing goes wrong, the lender’s claim runs over your revenue stream before it reaches you. Ask whether the licensee may grant security over the agreement, and ask for notice if it does.
Second, encumbrances outlive deals. The 2009 mortgages have sat on the register through an entire streaming era. The family’s position that it never sold the catalogue and will license it again when the term ends is an accurate description of ownership. The financing layer underneath is a separate question, and an unreleased security interest slows a transaction down years later.
Third, the registers are free and almost nobody looks at them. The Copyright Office recordation index, the Companies House charges register and the New York corporations dataset are public, searchable, and carry information no press release will contain. A manager with an afternoon can find out who has taken security over whose catalogue. In a market where Nigerian and South African catalogues are being bought and financed at scale, that is not a niche skill.
What could not be established#
The consideration, for either security: no principal, rate, facility size or maturity appears anywhere, and none is asserted. The corporate details of MRI Associated Labels, Inc., absent from the New York active corporations dataset and with no website that resolves. Whether “Knitting Factory Entertainment, Inc.” is the same legal entity as Knitting Factory Records Inc., and whether “Partisan Records Corporation” is the same as the Partisan Records LLC filed in Brooklyn in 2007. Why the same instrument was recorded twice, four months apart, with different schedules.
Every recordation number and register link behind this piece sits in the deal record for this transaction.
Both parties to the 2010 documents, and the current licence holder, are welcome to correct anything here that is wrong.
