Piracy Draining Nigeria’s Creative, Economic Force

Uzo Chikere

Piracy, intellectual property theft has from time constituted the bane of artistic and creative benefit in any clime. In Nigeria presently it has become hydra-headed and blood-sucking vampire draining the music, movie, publishing and soft-ware industries as well as denying the creative community its legitimate financial benefit through illegal means.

The toll piracy has taken in the creative industry particularly music and movie defies quantification and still expanding exponentially. Each day that passes, Nigerian musicians movie makers moan and morn their losses to a faceless band of intellectual property thieves who often masquerade as industry workers to reap from the farm yards of the true farmers.

While it is evident that hundreds of billions of naira is lost by the economy to the ugly acts of piracy, it not accurately known how much it amounts to. A few years ago,the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) in a statement informed that the film industry loses an estimated N4, 200,000,000 annually to illegal digital duplication, on-line piracy and unauthorized rental of video works within the country.

Another report in August, 2008, estimated the total annual loss of the content industries (Music, Software and Video) within the nation to be well over N100, 000,000,000, just as the Filmmaker Association of Nigeria (FAN) in the same year stated that the country loses an estimate of 4 million naira to international piracy of Nigerian movies in America, Canada and Europe. 

But in all, it is Prof. Pat Utomi who had attempted to put what would seem to be adequate figure to the loss to piracy when he posited that in view of these statistics, Nigeria could be losing well over $2 billion to piracy annually.

Utomi made this ascertion during the second edition of the Nigerian Entertainment Conference (NEC). He expressed that this piracy problem that has plagued the industry emanates from low level of awareness of the masses on the issue of property rights, weak support of intellectual copyright, and poor state of infrastructures.

Piracy, according to many industry players is so bad in Nigeria to the extent that Nigerian artistes, musicians and filmmakers now scared of releasing their latest albums and movies into the retail market. Neighboring countries are reported to have large quantities of pirated discs being exported from Nigeria across the region.

Key stakeholders in the creative arena are of the view that as long as there remains lack of adequate protection over time, which has further resulted in direct economic loss to right owners as well as direct denial of revenue from legitimate products’ to government, the entire economic system will continue to be adversely affected. In addition, they argue, the obvious moral and ethical reasons against unjust enrichment, intellectual theft and fraudulent claims that characterize piracy and other intellectual property abuses will not go away.

Stressing that piracy is a function of challenges arising from distribution which hugely  threatens the growth and development of the industry, he admonished that entertainment industry professionals shoud strive to educate themselves on this issue, so as to actively contribute to finding lasting solutions to the problem.

Another stakeholder advised that there is an urgent need to organize marketing and distribution strategy internationally to eliminate piracy and repatriate money and efforts back into the Nigerian economy. All said, it is difficult to say if the government and the relevant regulatory institutions are assiduously embarking on high wire act that would result in permanently stemming the ugly tide.