Four years ago, Davidson Ivusa sued Safaricom claiming ownership of the Reverse Call feature, which allows a customer to make a call with or without airtime and the receiver of the call pays on the caller’s behalf.
- •Ivusa argued that Safaricom picked the idea from a proposal christened Jichomoe which he shared with them via email on 10th May 2010.
- •Safaricom launched the Reverse Call feature in June 2019, triggering the suit as Ivusa argued that it had not notified him and had delayed its implementation for nine years.
- •Last month, the court ruled that Ivusa’s case lacked merit, siding with the telecommunications giant which argued that the feature was not unique, and that it had independently developed it in June 2018.
“There was no proof that Jichomoe had gained market recognition before the defendant’s service launch, nor was there evidence that consumers or industry stakeholders associated Safaricom Reverse Call Feature with Jichomoe,” Justice F. Mugambi ruled.
“Copyright law protects the expression of ideas, not the ideas themselves,” he added.
Safaricom’s defense mainly focused on the uniqueness of the feature, highlighting key differences between the Reverse Call Service and Jichomoe. For example, Reverse Call is limited to calls, while the Jichomoe proposal included calls, texts, and mobile internet.
“Our service requires the caller to dial a special prefix to initiate a reverse call, while Jichomoe functioned as a module or feature that needed to be installed on a customer’s handset,” Safaricom said in its court filings.
“Furthermore, the service requires a minimum airtime balance of Kshs 5, whereas Jichomoe did not specify any minimum balance. Based on these distinctions, we maintain that Reverse Call Service was developed independently.”
Among the cases the court quoted was a previous copyright case where Simon Omondi also sued the telecommunications giant. In that case, filed in 2011, Simon said that he had submitted a business proposal to Safaricom in 2009 describing a service promotion called ‘Maliza story.’
Although mainly similar, the ruling in Simon’s case included a reminder that “it would have been in the interest of morality and institutional reputation of the defendant to have appreciated the plaintiff.”
In 2020, the telco won another case where it had been sued for copyright infringement for the Okoa Jahazi service.
