Uganda is not a member of Berne. It is a member of TRIPS.

Uganda gained independence in 1962. Therefore it probably inherited at that date the UK's Copyright Act 1956 - although I am tempted to check whether it would not have been the UK's Copyright Act 1911 which was an imperial act and so extended to colonies, rather than applying in relation to them as the 1956 Act did.

It enacted its own act in 2006 with effect from 2007.

Under none of those things did copyright require registration and under all of those things copyright arose automatically in an author who qualified under the legislation when the work was reduced to a material form. The 2006 Act does not protect works that have already fallen into the public domain in Uganda.

It is therefore an error to speak of "copyrighting" a work. Ugandan copyright law is still much more like English copyright law than it is like US copyright law.

That said, there are still layers of potential rights: -

The words
The musical work
The arrangement
The rights of performers (see S 41)
The copyright in the sound recording.

It is far from clear in which are alleged to reside the rights giving rise to the income streams in question.


On a tangent, it seems that there is a gradual movement to protect intangible heritage - see http://www.unesco.org/culture/ich/index.php?lg=EN&pg=home - but I hesitate to ask whether it is "folk".