How Nigeria’s updated copyright law could be a game changer for its film industry and digital users

Nigeria has finally updated its 2004 copyright law, bringing it into the digital era – where the entertainment industry has been for decades already.

Before the late 1990s, it was difficult even to get telephone services in Nigeria. And it was very expensive for private enterprises to make films. Since then, digital technology has unleashed a multitude of ways to receive information and entertainment.

With the arrival of digital technology, all a filmmaker needed was a simple video recorder and a group of talented creatives. Thus modern Nollywood – the Nigerian film industry – was born.

Nollywood employs more than a million people directly or indirectly, making the sector Nigeria’s second largest employer after agriculture. In 2022, Nollywood’s contribution to Nigeria’s gross domestic product, or GDP, stood at 0.1%. It’s Africa’s most successful film industry and the third largest globally after Hollywood and Bollywood in terms of the number of movies produced annually.

But Nigeria’s copyright regime lagged behind the industry’s technological and business developments. The biggest issue was piracy, that it was easy to copy and sell other people’s work without their consent. The courts found themselves with new intellectual property problems to deal with and it was clear a new copyright regime was needed.

I have spent much of my career researching copyright law in Africa and...

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