Documenting Intellectual Property Theft By Corporations in Kenya

September 26th 2021: Safaricom Plc moves on to implement an M-PESA Bill Manager for Businesses that is a copy-paste of Kibo Capital Group Limited PaymentGate system registered at the Kenya Industrial Property Insitute (KIPI)

May 15th 2020: Safaricom goes ahead and implements #Tuwaanike, a new extra security feature that alerts you via SMS whenever someone tries to register a line using your National ID to stop rising M-PESA fraud.  This is 8 months after Tech Guru by the name Anyona Obutu had submitted the idea on Safaricom’s Zindua portal and a month after he made his innovation public. Safaricom says they don’t know him. Ripped off.

Zindua portal which has many complaints of copyright infringement is shut down permanently.

Other stories below:

Man sues Equity Bank over Sh10 million song - The Nairobi Star

A man has sued Equity Bank for using his song in the ‘Wings to Fly’ advertisement since 2013 without paying him.

Erick Nyadida, 22, informed the court yesterday that he has not received a cent from the bank for six years.

For constantly asking for his money, the bank charged him with attempting to defraud them of Sh 10 million, Nyadida said.

“I was 16 years when the bank told my brother and I through a letter that we had committed a criminal offence and we were to take statements the next day at Equity Centre,” Nyadida said.

On going to write statements, Nyadida said a security guard, Joachim Ithumbi, refused to take his statement and said "the bank does not want anything to do with that matter and we are ready to do anything to defend ourselves."

Later,Nyadida and his brother were taken to the Banking Fraud Unit at the Central Bank and finally detained at the Kileleshwa police station.

The next day, he was charged with his brother at a Milimani court with fraud, where they both pleaded not guilty.

In an affidavit filed in court, Nyadida said at that point he was not afforded the right to legal representation and it was a breach to his constitutional rights.

Nyadida had to change schools and even repeat an exam as he spent a lot of time in court for an offence he did not commit, he said.

“The case took three years in court and I was acquitted on October 3, 2017 since the prosecution had not provided enough evidence for the offence,” Nyadida said.

Nyadida composed the song ‘Wings to Fly’ while still a minor and studying at Maranda High School and later recorded it at Homeboyz studios.

The song was composed after Nyadida with the help of his manager John Kennedy got him an opportunity to create an original piece of music to be used by Equity Bank for their Wings to Fly project.

 “I severally wrote letters to Dr James Mwangi and other people at the bank in which I got responses but at some point, they asked me to reduce the cash from Sh10 million to Sh 2.5 million but I refused,” Nyadida said.

The court also heard that the bank sought to replace the pending arrears with a scholarship but Nyadida also turned the offer down.

Nyadida appeared before Justice Wilfrida Okwani where he sought justice for a song that has been used since 2013.

Banks sucked into Sh1bn PesaLink patent row - Business Daily

Kenya’s 30 banks are entangled in a legal suit in which a tech innovator is seeking Sh1 billion from the lenders, claiming that they used his idea to launch the interbank transfer service known as PesaLink.

Through senior counsel Tom Ojienda, Stephen Muikia Njongoro, says that PesaLink bears similar salient features and components as an idea he had shared with the Kenya Bankers Association (KBA) in 2015. He claims in court papers that the banks have raked in Sh2 billion from the money transfer platform and is claiming half of the earnings. “PesaLink bears similar salient features and components as my original expressed idea, which I had presented to the defendants way back in 2015,” said Mr Njongoro in court documents. “The second defendant has even shamefully used a substantively similar logo as that proposed by the plaintiff, as the trademark for its stolen PesaLink product”.

He has accused KBA of cashing in on the platform without his authority or granting him any royalties or compensation. The platform is offered by Integrated Payment Services Ltd (IPSL), a fully-owned subsidiary of KBA, and can handle person-to-person transfers from as low as Sh10 to a high of Sh999,999.

Mr Njongoro says that according to the KBA website, there are about 30 banks that use the payment platform which has more than three million registered accounts. He says that he spent resources to come up with the innovation and had hoped to commercialise his idea.

In the matter filed at the Commercial Division of the High Court in Nairobi, Mr Njongoro wants the case to be heard urgently, arguing that KBA has been illegally using his idea for commercial benefit. He is also seeking a temporary injunction stopping the use of PesaLink, arguing that the platform has infringed on his copyright.

Other than KBA, he has also named IPSL and the Central Bank of Kenya (CBK) as respondents in the case. He said he intended to create a platform where interbank transfers could be conducted in the comfort and at the convenience of one’s phone.

Mr Njongoro called his idea “All in one banking innovation” with the slogan “All in one, huduma zote za benki zote or lipa na benki yako”. The product was registered with the Kenya Copyright Board and issued with a certificate on February 2, 2015.

The innovator said he sold the idea to CBK, seeking guidance on how to introduce it to commercial banks in Kenya. In his court documents, he says that CBK advised him to share the idea with KBA. However, the bankers’ lobby group responded to him on July 2015, saying the innovation was not right for the banking industry.

KBA said the intra-bank transfer would be costly to customers, kill competition among banks and destroy bankers’ independent brands. Later, Mr Njongoro said he was puzzled to learn from a newspaper article that IPSL had rolled out a similar innovation known as PesaLink.

PesaLink was launched in February 2017 and had transacted Sh81 billion in the 17 months to August last year.

Kenya was among the first countries in the world to use such a platform, which was set up to rival telcos’ mobile money transfer services currently dominated by M-Pesa. KBA manages the switch and facilitates direct transfers without going through intermediaries such as M-Pesa, Airtel Money and Orange Money.

Man Seeks Equity Bank Support To Sue Safaricom for “Stealing” Mpesa 1 Tap Idea - Nairobi Wire

Safaricom has been accused countless times for ‘stealing ideas’.

The thing is, for a corporation as large as Safaricom, generating Sh200 billion in revenue a year, there’s no shortage of ideas. These can be both inhouse or outsourced.

But incidents of people claiming their ideas were stolen never end.

The latest is one Jonathan Gikabu who is accusing the giant telco of stealing his idea of an NFC payment system.

On Wednesday, Safaricom announced their full year results. They also made an exciting announcement of a new card that mirrors your Mpesa account, which make payment easy. They’ve branded it Mpesa 1 Tap.

Mr. Gikabu however feels this is the same idea he presented Safaricom back in 2014.

Here’s the initial email he sent Safaricom back then.

In a letter seeking to enjoin Equity Bank in the suit, the computer scientist says that he is the originator of this idea, having worked on the building blocks back in 2014.

It is however extremely unlikely that Equity Bank will offer this poor lad any kind of support.

Some years back, a guy came out claiming that Safaricom had stolen his bus fare idea, which I think was later launched as the 1963 card.

Other ideas Safaricom has been accused of stealing are Lipa Kodi, Maliza Storo, M-Kesho etc.

With all these pending accusations, I wonder why someone would come out and complain in 2017. Don’t you Google?

An idea like Mpesa 1 Tap isn’t so revolutionary that only one person thought of it… No offence to Mr. Gikabu. With a company as big as Safaricom, it’s possible that many ideas are generated and thrown around often. And with the success of Lipa na Mpesa, it would be logical to think that a card would be the next step.

However, if you feel that your idea is what the world has been waiting for, there are ways to protect it before sharing it with outside parties.

The Kenya Industrial Property Institute (KIPI) should be your first stop before sharing highly priced ideas, designs or prototypes.

If you do not protect your idea, and then share it with Safaricom, there’s nothing stopping them from saying they had the same idea first.

At the time of your disclosure, I don’t believe there’s any law compelling Safaricom to tell you that they’ve been thinking of the same thing.

But still, not every kind of wild idea can be protected. After all, each of us is always day dreaming with thousands of ideas crossing our minds.

According to Kenya’s Industrial Act Section 21 (b), patentable inventions do not include:
“schemes, rules or methods for doing business, performing purely mental acts or playing games”

Well, that’s a vague statement, but I don’t see anyone winning a case against Safaricom soon.

In fact, the telco welcomed the suit by Mr. Gikabu and co.

Later court ruled in favour of Safaricom.

Safaricom stole our idea to roll out M-Shwari, Faulu Kenya says. - ICT Ville