REFLECTIONS ON THE COPYRIGHT ACT
BY AYUBA JOHN RAMADAN
Nigeria has been inundated with many issues about authorship rights and violations of ethical responsibilities within the Nigerian academic space and journalism as a profession.
This has become a burdensome challenge, especially for genuine authors who spend their time and energy putting their best into producing either work of literature, art, audio-visual, sound recordings or broadcast materials.
Needless to contend that this trend has continued to persist unabated, regardless of the extant laws in place to regulate and curtail the activities of these miscreants whose stock in trade is to prey on the intellectual prowess of innocent authors, to take credit for their works and make money off of it without any moral or ethical boundary or sense of regard.
One of the fundamental principles of ethics is that it has been adjudged to be the science of morality that determines the rightness or wrongness of action for an individual with contemplation to violate moral boundaries of acceptable behaviour.
It becomes pertinent to state at this juncture that the infringement and theft of intellectual property are rooted in mind, where contemplation begins before the manifestation of an act that translates into criminal behaviour.
A cardinal sine qua non of Nigeria’s 2022 copyright Act is that it was set to protect authors’ rights to ensure just rewards and recognition for their intellectual efforts.
In addition, the Act provides appropriate limitations and exceptions to guarantee access to creative works to facilitate Nigeria’s compliance with obligations arising from relevant international copyright treaties and conventions.
It was also set out to enhance the capacity of the Nigerian Copyright Commission for effective regulation, administration and enforcement of the provisions of the Act.
These statutory provisions stipulate a caveat for authors to guard against intellectual theft or inappropriate use of another author’s works without due credit and acknowledgement.
The journalism industry in Nigeria today has been overwhelmed with many Copyright violation issues popularly referred to as the ‘copy and paste’ syndrome.
This trend sees the duplication of news stories that share the same characteristics and formats across several mass media outlets that begets one to question the authenticity of authorship for these same stories when issues of Copyright violations arise in the near or distant future.
Without a shadow of a doubt, journalistic ethics are anchored on objectivity, fairness, accuracy and authenticity, which have been included to engender critical investigations and research for news stories and other journalistic activities.
This appears to be lacking at an alarming rate within the country’s journalistic space.
An overview of section 2 subsection 1 of the 2022 Copyright Act provides that works eligible for copyright include; literary, musical, artistic, audio-visual, sound, and broadcast materials.
Without further elucidating the concepts of the previous works eligible for copyright as stipulated by the Act, an understanding of the provisions of the Act, especially by Journalists and intellectuals immersed in academic scholarship, cannot be over-emphasized.
Without mincing words, the proliferation of sub-standard and quack Journalists in Nigeria’s Journalism industry has become a concern.
This is because any Journalist that has gone through academic tutelage of the profession before delving into the same cannot deny the fact that knowledge of Journalistic ethics and Copyright law is heavily ingrained in the process of baking a Journalist in any tertiary institution in Nigeria or any part of the world today.
The issue of non-interest and non-compliance to the Copyright Act today has brought about the concept of ‘armchair’ journalism, similar to the idea of ‘armchair’ researchers within the academic realm.
This is a situation where Journalists deliberately shy away from carrying out critical investigations of news story items but instead rely on the works of other Journalists alike to prey on their works and take credit for such publications in several mass media channels.
A glance at part II of the Copyright Act, which covers sections 20 to 27, delves into the issue of exceptions to copyright.
This section generally deals with the rights conferred regarding work under sections 9 to 13 of the Act.
It does not include the right to control any acts specified in those sections through fair dealing for purposes such as private use, parody, satire, pastiche, caricature, non-commercial research, private study and criticism.
The inference of these provisions portends the limitations of the eligible works covered by the Act.
It imprints a regulation on some who might be overzealous in adhering to the requirements of the Act to the point of infringement of private concerns and other non-eligible materials proffered.
In as much as the Act confers restrictions on the use of the intellectual property by authors, it also provides for the regulation of over-ambitious compliance on the other end in a bid to checkmate overzealous authors and Journalists alike who may want to reign in on the works of others they are privileged to critique and scrutinise.
Vehemently, Part III of the Act is hinged on issues of ownership, transfers and licences, where it provides that a person, in the absence of an agreement to the contrary, creates work under a contract for services or in the course of employment by a government, a ministry, department or agency of a government, or a prescribed international or inter-governmental organisation, the copyright in that work shall vest in that government, church, department, agency, prescribed international or inter-governmental organisation.
The inference of this section denotes that where a person, for private and domestic purposes, commissions the taking of a photograph or the painting or drawing of a portrait, or the making of an audio-visual work, the person who commissioned the work shall be deemed to have a non-exclusive licence to exploit the commissioned work for non-commercial purposes and entitled to restrain the publication, exhibition, broadcasting, communication, distribution and making available of copies of the work to the public.
A lot of Journalists in Nigeria have fallen short of the requirements of this provision in the sense that many of them have engaged in the act of publication and exhibition of broadcast and communication material in art, textual and audio-visual formats of many authors on the print, broadcast and social media without giving due credit to the owners of these intellectual properties.
This is a gross violation of the provisions of the Copyright Act.
It becomes pertinent to consider that ‘ignorance of the law is no excuse’ as popularly stated in many legal climes.
The activities of Journalists who violate the Act are not an exception in any way.
A casual view of the perceptions of many so-called practising Journalists in the journalism industry today poses an issue of concern because a large percentage of them are not aware of the existence of the Act, talk more of knowledge of what it contains and due adherence to same.
This condition has placed the journalism industry in a precarious position of endangerment to professional practice, especially to the few professionals within the industry who have been fully baked with sound tutelage of the demands of the industry and the responsibilities that go along.
The future can seem bleak for the Journalism industry in Nigeria today due to the exposure from this context.
That may not be so. A burden of responsibility lies on media entrepreneurs and media employers alike to look beyond the business aspect of the profession and key into the intellectual capacity of their journalist employees to ensure and enhance that they are adequately trained and exposed to the academic arm of the work to boost their power and live up to their statutory responsibilities.
