In March 2025, Omoni Oboli woke up to find that Love in Every Word, a film that had accumulated over seven million views in its first two days on YouTube, had been pulled from her channel overnight. A copyright claim had been filed. Just like that, one of the most successful Nollywood releases of the year vanished from the platform where most of her audience watched it. The film was eventually reinstated. But for the hours it was down, Oboli had no control over her own work. The visibility she had built, the momentum of the launch, the audience watching in real time, all of it was interrupted by a single filing. The situation eventually resolved itself, however, not every creator is that fortunate. This highlights the urgent need for robust copyright protection in Nigeria.
Copyright disputes in Nigeria’s creative industry are not rare events. They are a recurring feature of how the industry operates, screenwriters whose scripts are adapted without credit or compensation, filmmakers whose work appears on television stations in Ghana and Côte d’Ivoire without a licence, musicians whose recordings circulate freely on download platforms they never agreed to. The incidents differ in scale and specificity, but the underlying problem is consistent: work gets used without permission, and the creator is left to figure out what to do about it.
The answer, the legally correct, strategically sound answer, starts with understanding what the law actually gives you. And under the Copyright Act 2022, it provides more than most creators realise regarding copyright protection in Nigeria.
What Piracy Actually Does to a Creator
The word piracy tends to conjure images of physical bootlegs sold outside bus parks, or bulk DVD duplication operations. The modern reality is more diffuse and, for that reason, harder to see.
A screenwriter loses a commission because the producer discovered her previous script had been uploaded in full to a Telegram channel. A documentary filmmaker loses a licensing deal because his film is already available for free on three separate download sites. A musician’s album, released on a Friday, is available on every major piracy platform by Saturday morning, depressing the first-week streaming numbers that would have attracted label attention.
Piracy causes loss of revenue, that much is obvious. But it also causes loss of control: the ability to decide where your work appears, how it is framed, who has access to it, and at what price. And it causes reputational damage that is harder to quantify but no less real, a creator whose work circulates in low-quality, watermarked, or altered versions loses something that money cannot easily recover. Effective Copyright protection in Nigeria aims to prevent this specific loss of agency.
Nollywood alone loses an estimated ₦7.5 billion annually to piracy. That figure is not spread evenly across studios and distributors. Much of it is absorbed by working producers, directors, and artists who never recoup their initial investment because the audience that should have paid for access got it for free.
The Law’s Starting Point: Automatic Protection
One of the most important things to understand about copyright protection in Nigeria is that it does not require you to do anything to acquire it.
Under the Copyright Act 2022, copyright subsists automatically the moment a work is created and fixed in a tangible form. When the film exists on a hard drive, the law protects it. Once the song is recorded, the law protects it. If the book is written, the law protects it. You do not need to register or file anything to begin enjoying copyright protection in Nigeria.
The eligible categories are broad: literary works, musical works, artistic works, audiovisual works, sound recordings, and broadcasts. If your work falls into any of these categories and you created it, Nigerian law gives you the exclusive right to reproduce it, distribute it, broadcast it, adapt it, and make it available to the public. Anyone who does any of those things without your permission is infringing your copyright.
That is the foundation. But the foundation is only as useful as the structure you build on top of it.
Why Registration Matters Anyway
If copyright is automatic, why register at all? This is a question creators ask often, and the answer is practical rather than theoretical.
The Nigerian Copyright Commission maintains a voluntary registration scheme. When you register a work, you receive an Acknowledgment Certificate that serves as prima facie evidence of ownership. In plain terms: if two people both claim to own the same work, the one with the registration certificate has the stronger legal starting position. The burden shifts to the other party to disprove it.
Registration also serves a critical function when ownership is disputed years after creation. Production files get lost. Collaborators fall out and revisit prior agreements. Witnesses’ recollections shift. The certificate remains.
There is a third reason that is less often discussed: in an industry where infringement is common, registration creates a searchable, verifiable record. Rights holders who want to licence your work legitimately; television stations, streaming platforms, international distributors, can confirm ownership quickly. The absence of that record is, in practice, a barrier to commercial opportunity.
Register your work. Not because the law requires it. Because enforcing what you own is much harder without proof that you own it.
What You Can Do When Piracy Occurs
When your work has been used without authorisation, Nigerian law provides several distinct remedies. They are not mutually exclusive. Depending on the circumstances, you may be able to pursue more than one simultaneously.
1. An Injunction to Stop the Infringement Immediately
The most urgent remedy in many cases is not money, it is stopping the infringement from continuing. An injunction is a court order compelling the infringer to cease the unauthorised use immediately. Interim injunctions can be obtained quickly, sometimes before the full hearing of a case, where you can demonstrate that ongoing infringement is causing harm that cannot be adequately remedied later by damages alone.
For a filmmaker whose work is being broadcast without a licence, or a musician whose album is circulating freely while their official release is live, the speed of an injunction matters as much as its effect. Every day the infringement continues is revenue and control lost.
2. Damages for the Loss You Have Suffered
Section 37(2) of the Copyright Act 2022 expressly provides for monetary damages in copyright infringement cases. The purpose of damages is to restore you, as closely as possible, to the position you would have been in had the infringement not occurred. This can include lost revenue, lost licensing income, and harm to the commercial value of the work.
Nigerian courts are willing to make substantial awards where infringement is proven. In 2024, filmmaker Femi Adebayo was awarded ₦25 million in damages by a Lagos High Court after a three-year legal battle over the unauthorised streaming of his film Survival of Jelili on YouTube. That case is a reference point, not a ceiling for what courts are prepared to award when the evidence is strong.
One nuance worth noting: where an infringer can demonstrate genuine ignorance, that they had no reasonable grounds to suspect copyright subsisted in the work, damages may not be available, but an account of profits still is. The law does not let wilful blindness serve as a complete escape.
3. An Account of Profits
Where an infringer has made money from your work, whether by selling copies, monetising views, attracting advertising, or otherwise commercialising what they had no right to use, the court can order them to account for and surrender those profits. This remedy is particularly significant where the infringer’s gain exceeds what your demonstrable loss would be. You are entitled to what they made from using what is yours.
4. Criminal Prosecution
Where infringement is deliberate and commercial in nature, it does not only attract civil consequences. It is a criminal offence. Under Section 44(1)(a) of the Copyright Act 2022, those who possess, reproduce, distribute, or make infringing copies available to the public face criminal prosecution by the Nigerian Copyright Commission, with penalties including substantial fines and imprisonment.
The March 2026 arraignment of Emmanuel Analike, CEO of NetNaija, before the Federal High Court in Abuja on four counts of copyright infringement is the most visible recent example of this enforcement mechanism in action. The NCC is no longer treating criminal prosecution as a last resort. It is treating it as a proportionate response to large-scale, deliberate infringement.
5. Complaints to the Nigerian Copyright Commission
Beyond civil court action, copyright owners can file complaints directly with the NCC. The Commission has investigative and enforcement powers; including the authority to conduct raids, seize infringing materials, and refer matters for criminal prosecution. It also has the power to issue notices requiring online service providers to take down infringing content and to partner with bodies like NIRA to deactivate domain names used to distribute pirated works.
The NCC route does not replace civil action. It complements it and in cases where speed and scale matter more than monetary recovery, it can be the more effective first step.
6. Customs Enforcement
A lesser-known but practically useful remedy: under the Copyright Act 2022, you can give written notice to the Nigerian Customs Service requesting that they treat infringing copies of your work as prohibited goods. If your work is being imported into Nigeria in infringing form, physical media, product packaging, printed materials, this mechanism can intercept it at the border before it reaches the market.
Before Piracy Happens: Practical Steps That Actually Protect You
The remedies above are powerful. But they are remedies, they respond to harm already done. The stronger position is the one that reduces the likelihood of infringement occurring and maximises your ability to act decisively when it does.
- Document everything from the beginning: Production files, drafts, timestamps, contracts with collaborators, commissioning emails, keep them. The creator who can produce a clear paper trail from the original idea to the finished work is in a fundamentally stronger legal position than the one who cannot. This is especially important in collaborative environments where script ownership and contribution can become contested years later.
- Register your work with the NCC: The Acknowledgment Certificate is practical protection, not a formality. It creates a verifiable record that pre-dates any dispute. For creators working at volume, releasing music regularly, producing multiple films or written works, consider registering each significant work systematically rather than selectively.
- Distribute through controlled, traceable channels: Releasing work through platforms that log access, require authentication, or have built-in rights management systems makes unauthorised redistribution harder and, when it occurs, easier to trace. Watermarking, especially for screeners and early distribution copies, provides forensic evidence of the source of a leak.
- License clearly and in writing: Every commercial use of your work by a third party should be covered by a written licence agreement that specifies what is permitted, for how long, in what territories, and at what price. A television station that says it has your permission to broadcast your film and a television station that has a signed licensing agreement are legally in very different positions. Verbal arrangements, regardless of how clear they seemed at the time, are difficult to enforce and easy to dispute.
- Monitor actively, not occasionally: Set up alerts for your film titles, song names, and brand identifiers across major platforms. Check download sites periodically. When a Nollywood film appears on a Ghanaian television station without a licence, it is rarely immediately obvious, it surfaces through audience reports, social media posts, or targeted monitoring. The earlier you detect an infringement, the more options you have in responding to it.
- Engage IP counsel before a crisis, not during one: The most costly copyright disputes are the ones where the creator’s legal position was avoidable with prior structuring. Agreements that do not properly assign rights. Productions where it was never clearly documented who owned what. Licences that were too broad or too narrow for what the parties intended. These issues, addressed properly at the start, rarely become litigation. Discovered in the middle of a dispute, they become significant vulnerabilities.
The Particular Problem of Cross-Border Infringement
One of the more frustrating realities of IP enforcement in the Nollywood context is that infringement frequently crosses borders. In 2025, Omoni Oboli and Bimbo Ademoye publicly called out Ghanaian television stations for broadcasting their films without authorisation, sparking a broader debate about who is responsible for policing intellectual property violations that occur outside Nigeria’s jurisdiction.
The short answer is that cross-border enforcement is harder, slower, and more expensive than domestic enforcement. The longer answer is that it is not impossible and that the legal groundwork laid in Nigeria (registration, documented ownership, clear licensing history) is the foundation on which cross-border claims are built. Nigeria is a signatory to international copyright treaties, including the Berne Convention, which means Nigerian copyright holders have enforceable rights in member countries. But asserting those rights requires local counsel in the infringing jurisdiction and a clear record of ownership to present to foreign courts or regulatory bodies.
The lesson is not that cross-border infringement is unaddressable. It is that creators who have invested in proper documentation and registration are far better placed to pursue it than those who have not.
Protecting Your Work Is a Business Decision, Not a Legal Technicality
There is a tendency among creators to think of copyright protection as something that applies to other people, to studios and labels and major distributors, not to individual filmmakers and musicians and writers working in the Nigerian market.
That thinking is exactly what pirates count on.
Your work has commercial value. It took time, money, skill, and effort to produce. The law recognises that and gives you rights over it. What the law cannot do is exercise those rights on your behalf without your involvement. It cannot register your work for you. It cannot document your ownership. It cannot file the complaint, instruct the solicitor, or apply for the injunction.
You have to do those things. Or, more precisely, you have to ensure they are done properly, which, in a legal context, means with proper counsel.
The creators who protect their work effectively are not the ones who react most vigorously after infringement. They are the ones who structure their creative output, from production to distribution, in a way that leaves them with clear rights, strong evidence, and viable options when things go wrong.
The enforcement era in Nigeria is real. The tools exist but whether you benefit from them depends on what you do before you need them.
Has Your Work Been Used Without Your Permission?
Whether you are a filmmaker, musician, writer, or business owner, Starr Attorneys advises on copyright registration, infringement response, and enforcement across Nigeria. We help you protect what you have built, before someone else profits from it.
Copyright protection under Nigerian law is not passive. It is a framework of rights that, used proactively, gives creators real leverage. Used reactively — after the film has been broadcast, after the album has been distributed, after the script has been adapted — it becomes a much harder case to make. The most important step is always the first one: understanding what you own and taking the steps to prove it.
Written by: Favour Haggai Umar
Associate Lawyer
Starr Attorneys
Need help safeguarding your business? Book a consultation with Starr Attorneys today. We’ll help you manage risks, stay compliant, and build a business that lasts.
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