For most Batswana, copyright is an abstraction – the fine print nobody reads, the warning that flickers before a film, the symbol stamped on the back of a textbook. Last month, in a modest magistrate’s court in Mogoditshane, that abstraction acquired a price tag: P38,276.64.
On 21 September, Chief Magistrate Gofaone Morweng ruled that the Copyright Society of Botswana, known universally by its acronym COSBOTS, was entitled to judgment against Dawn Bell Academy, the fast-growing private school founded and led by the entrepreneur, author and pastor Ndiko Muzila. The court ordered the academy to pay the disputed licensing fees – and to carry the costs of the litigation. COSBOTS had sued in December 2025, alleging that the academy had reproduced and used copyright-protected literary and image works without a licence.
The academy has signalled that it will not go quietly. In messages to parents, and in a public campaign that has drawn sympathisers who frame the levy as “extortion,” Dawn Bell has indicated it intends to fight on, with an appeal openly canvassed. Ms Muzila has argued, in essence, that she is being made to pay roughly P40,000 for books she wrote herself – a position that has resonated widely precisely because it sounds, on its face, absurd.
It is that apparent absurdity that makes the case such a useful teacher. Beneath the headline figure lies a tangle of ideas – authorship, ownership, licensing, reproduction and the role of a middleman society – that most of us never have reason to untangle. This is an attempt to do so.
What COSBOTS actually is
Start with the plaintiff, because almost everything flows from understanding it. COSBOTS is not a government department and not a private debt collector. It is a collective management organisation – a CMO – established in 2008 as a non-profit company limited by guarantee, operating under the supervision of the Copyright Office within the Companies and Intellectual Property Authority (CIPA).
Its authority derives from the Copyright and Neighbouring Rights Act (CAP 68:02 of 2006). Under that mandate, COSBOTS does four things: it monitors where copyright-protected works are being used; it licenses those users; it collects royalties from them; and it distributes those royalties back to the rights holders it represents.
A CMO exists to solve a practical impossibility. No individual author, composer or illustrator can realistically track every classroom, radio station, bar or photocopier in the country that uses their work, let alone invoice each one. So creators pool their rights and appoint a single society to license use on their behalf and remit the proceeds. In exchange, users get a one-stop shop: pay the society, and you are cleared to use the entire repertoire it administers. Versions of this model operate in nearly every country – from South Africa’s DALRO to Britain’s Copyright Licensing Agency.
That is the system Dawn Bell collided with.
The heart of the dispute: writing a book is not the same as owning its every use
The academy’s most powerful rhetorical point – these are my own books – is also where the law is most counter-intuitive, and worth slowing down over.
Copyright separates two things ordinary language runs together: authorship and ownership of specific rights. Authorship is a question of fact – who created the work. Ownership of the economic rights (the right to reproduce, distribute, adapt and so on) is a question of law and contract, and those rights can be split, licensed, assigned or pooled.
The question a court must ask, therefore, is not “did Ms Muzila write these books?” but “what, exactly, was being copied – and who holds the rights in it?” COSBOTS did not sue over original authorship. It sued, by its own account, over the reproduction and use of copyright-protected literary and image works at the school. Several distinct possibilities sit inside that phrase, and they matter enormously:
- The materials in question may have included works by other authors and illustrators – the images, extracts, diagrams or texts woven into teaching materials – in which Dawn Bell holds no rights at all.
- The academy’s reproduction of material (photocopying, bulk printing, distribution to pupils) may itself be a licensable act, regardless of who wrote the underlying words, if it falls within the repertoire COSBOTS administers.
- Where an author has become a member of the collective society, the terms of that membership can determine how even their own works are licensed and how royalties flow back.
The precise basis of the P38,276.64 claim is the detail that resolves the apparent paradox – and it is the detail that the full written judgment, not the headlines, will settle. On the facts as reported, the magistrate was satisfied that a licensable use had occurred and that COSBOTS was entitled to be paid for it.
Fair dealing, and why ‘it’s a school’ is not a trump card
Many readers will reasonably ask: surely education is exempt? Copyright law does carve out space for teaching through what lawyers call fair dealing – limited, good-faith uses such as quotation, criticism, research or illustration in instruction. But fair dealing is narrow, not a blanket amnesty. It typically does not stretch to the systematic, repeated, institution-wide reproduction of protected material that substitutes for buying or licensing it. A school that photocopies a chapter for a single lesson stands on very different ground from one that reproduces works at scale as a standing part of its model.
The distinction the Dawn Bell ruling implicitly draws is this: being a school earns you consideration under the fair-dealing exceptions; it does not earn you immunity from licensing.
Why this ruling echoes beyond one school
Precedent in a magistrate’s court does not bind the higher courts, and an appeal – if pursued – could yet reframe or reverse the outcome. But the signal is unmistakable. For the first time in recent memory, a Botswana court has endorsed COSBOTS’s power to pursue a literary and visual licensing claim against an educational institution, in a jurisdiction where the society’s enforcement has historically been associated with music, bars and broadcasters.
Every private academy, tuition centre, printing bureau and content-heavy business in the country should read the judgment as a notice. The questions it raises are now live: What are you reproducing? Whose rights are embedded in it? Do you hold a licence? “We didn’t know” has rarely been a defence in copyright law, and it is not one here.
There is a counter-current worth airing honestly. COSBOTS, like CMOs across the continent, faces persistent criticism over transparency – how it sets tariffs, how it calculates a figure such as P38,276.64, and whether the royalties it collects reliably reach the creators in whose name they are gathered. Local musicians have voiced exactly these grievances. A ruling that strengthens the society’s hand to collect also sharpens the public’s right to ask how it distributes. Enforcement power and accountability are two sides of the same coin; the legitimacy of the first depends on the second.
The lesson, stripped bare
The enduring value of the Dawn Bell case is that it dramatises a truth most people never confront: the moment a creative work enters the world of commerce, it stops being merely yours and becomes a bundle of rights governed by law. Who may copy it, teach from it, sell it or earn from it is no longer settled by the simple fact of having made it. It is settled by statute, by contract, and – increasingly in Botswana – by the courts.
For a knowledge economy that Vision 2036 insists the country must become, that is not a footnote. It is the foundation. A nation that wants its writers, musicians, coders and illustrators to earn a living from their minds must build citizens who understand that ideas, once shared, carry both value and rules. The P38,276.64 is almost incidental. The education is the point.
