Copyright and authorship: a protection that exists, but not for everyone
There is a scene that plays out with near-ritual regularity in Facebook groups, TikTok comment sections, and Eritrean diaspora communities online: someone posts that an Ethiopian singer has just released a track — or an entire album — that sounds strangely familiar. Familiar because it was already written, composed, recorded, and sung by someone else. Familiar because it is Eritrean. Outrage spreads, comments multiply, the thread fills with appeals to conscience and basic decency. Then the post slides down the feed, and the cycle begins again.
These are not isolated incidents. Dozens, perhaps hundreds, of Eritrean songs have been lifted — in part or in full — by Ethiopian artists, sometimes with minimal melodic adjustments, sometimes without even that. The problem is not only moral, though the moral dimension is real and should not be dismissed. The problem is that outrage, however justified, is not a legal instrument. And without legal instruments, cultural theft continues undisturbed.
In advanced legal systems, musical copyright operates on two distinct planes. The first is moral rights: these guarantee authorship and are by nature perpetual and inalienable — no one can legitimately claim to have written someone else’s work. The second is economic rights, which give the author the power to authorize or prohibit the use of their work and to receive compensation each time it is performed, broadcast, reproduced, or distributed. Both planes find their international foundation in the Berne Convention, a treaty signed by virtually every country in the world — including Eritrea and Ethiopia — which guarantees, in principle, automatic cross-border protection. A song recorded in Asmara is, on paper, as protected in London, Berlin, and Nairobi as it is at home.
On paper. Because between that principle and its concrete application there lies an abyss — and into that abyss fall, every day, the work of artists who lack the tools to enforce what the law nominally grants them.
How protection works where it actually works
In countries with a structured music industry, copyright protection does not rest on written law alone. It rests on a technical, institutional, and financial infrastructure that transforms that law into daily practice. The system turns on three fundamental pillars.
The first is collective management organizations: bodies such as SACEM in France, GEMA in Germany, SIAE in Italy, or ASCAP and BMI in the United States collect and distribute revenue on behalf of artists whenever their music is broadcast on radio, licensed for film, played in a public venue, or streamed on a digital platform. These organizations monitor the market continuously and act legally on behalf of registered artists, without requiring each of them to pursue every infringement on their own.
The second pillar is technological, and it is the one that today provides the most immediate and far-reaching protection. YouTube’s Content ID is an audio fingerprinting system: every song registered in its database generates a unique digital signature, and every video uploaded to the platform is automatically matched against that signature. When a match is detected, the rights holder is notified and can choose to block the content globally, monetize it directly — redirecting advertising revenue away from whoever used the work without permission — or simply monitor its spread. The numbers involved are difficult to absorb: in 2024 alone, the system issued 2.2 billion automated claims, with automated detection accounting for more than 99 percent of them. Total payouts to rights holders crossed twelve billion dollars.
The third pillar is judicial. In advanced legal systems, a victim of musical theft can pursue litigation and obtain not only the removal of the unauthorized content but financial damages as well. High-profile cases — the dispute between the estate of Marvin Gaye and Robin Thicke over ‘Blurred Lines,’ the protracted litigation surrounding Led Zeppelin’s ‘Stairway to Heaven’ — show that music plagiarism jurisprudence is contested and technically demanding, but it exists, it has weight, and it is enforced. The precondition, here too, is prior registration of the work: without formal documentation of authorship and date of creation, even the strongest legal claim becomes difficult to sustain in court.
Eritrea and the structural void: when the foundations are missing
The problem for Eritrea is not a shortage of talent, nor an absence of deep and original musical tradition. The problem is structural, rooted in a context where the infrastructure required to make any protection system function simply does not exist — or exists in wholly inadequate form.
Eritrea is among the countries with the lowest internet penetration in the world: fewer than ten percent of the population has regular access to the network. Beyond connectivity, the deficits compound. There is no national platform for digital music distribution, no collective rights management society, no copyright registry that is digitally accessible, affordable, and internationally recognized. There is no banking system sufficiently integrated with international platforms to allow an artist to actually receive the proceeds generated by their music abroad. Each of these absences alone would be an obstacle; together, they form a wall.
The practical consequences are direct. An Eritrean singer who releases music through informal YouTube channels, WhatsApp groups, or recordings circulating within the diaspora has deposited no digital fingerprint in any international database. In the eyes of automated detection systems, that artist does not exist as a rights holder. Anyone — including an Ethiopian singer assembling material for an album — can appropriate that work without triggering any automatic defense, without a notification reaching anyone, without a cent being redirected.
The Eritrean diaspora — spread across Europe, North America, and the Middle East — has tried in part to fill this void informally. Artists open YouTube channels, maintain social media pages, collect donations through PayPal or Western Union. These are improvised solutions, dependent on third-party goodwill, entirely without institutional coordination or legal force. Relying on the generosity of intermediaries or the momentum of social media outrage is not a cultural policy. It is what cultural policy looks like when it does not exist.
What is needed: a concrete agenda for moving beyond indignation
Eritrean music is a cultural heritage of extraordinary depth and originality, and that heritage continues to be plundered — not because no law exists to protect it, but because the material conditions required to enforce that law are absent. Changing this demands a concrete agenda, operating on several levels at once.
The first level is institutional. Eritrea needs a national copyright management organization for music — a body that registers artists’ works, represents them before international platforms and foreign collecting societies, and acts when infringements occur. This is not an impossible undertaking: countries with far more constrained resources have built comparable structures. The model is established, it is replicable, and its absence in Eritrea is a political choice before it is a technical limitation.
The second level is technological and financial. For any protection system to function in practice, artists must be able to distribute their music through digital aggregators onto international platforms — Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube — registering their fingerprints in global databases in the process. This requires reliable internet access, functional digital payment tools, and a banking system capable of receiving revenue from abroad. None of this is peripheral: digital and financial infrastructure is the necessary condition for any right, however clearly written into law, to become something an artist can actually use.
The third level concerns the diaspora. Eritrean communities abroad possess expertise, networks, and resources that could be mobilized far more systematically than they are. Cultural associations, intellectual property lawyers, music industry professionals based in European and North American cities could form a collective reference point for artists facing infringement — assisting them with platform takedown requests, work registration, and, where the situation warrants, legal action.
The next time an Eritrean song appears under someone else’s name — and there will be a next time — the adequate response is not collective outrage in comment sections, however understandable that impulse may be. The adequate response is for that song to already be on file in an international database, for its fingerprint to already exist, for a national body to already have standing to act, and for the artist to already be owed something enforceable. Moral indignation is a beginning. It has never, on its own, been enough.
Bibliography
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- Kretschmer, Martin, and Friedemann Kawohl. “The History and Philosophy of Copyright.” In Music and Copyright, edited by Simon Frith and Lee Marshall, 21–53. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004.
- YouTube. “How Content ID Works.” Google Support. Accessed June 2026. https://support.google.com/youtube/answer/2797370
- Google. “YouTube Transparency Report: Copyright.” 2024. https://transparencyreport.google.com/copyright/overview
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- Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers (CISAC). Global Collections Report 2023. Paris: CISAC, 2023. https://www.cisac.org/Newsroom/news-releases/cisac-global-collections-report-2023
