Intellectual Property rights and productivity in Nigeria (II)

Suffice to state here that Industrial property includes ‘patents to protect inventions and industrial designs which are aesthetic creations.’ It also covers trademarks, service marks, lay-out design of integrate circuits , commercial names and designatios. Copyight concerns artistic creations such as books, music, paintings, sculptures, films, data-based works such as computer programmes. They are simply […]

Suffice to state here that Industrial property includes ‘patents to protect inventions and industrial designs which are aesthetic creations.’ It also covers trademarks, service marks, lay-out design of integrate circuits , commercial names and designatios. Copyight concerns artistic creations such as books, music, paintings, sculptures, films, data-based works such as computer programmes. They are simply referred to as authors’ rights.
Note that there are criticisms of intellectual property when it is overbroad and over-inclusive. WIPO itself identified one such criticism/conflict with regard to whether ‘Human rights and intellectual property’ with regard to determining whether intellectual property is an economic imperative or a social imperative (See WIPO; 2011) United Nations Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights issued a document on the issue which argued that ‘intellectual property tends to be governed by economic goals when it should viewed as a social product; in order to serve human well-being, intellectual property systems must respect and conform with human rights laws ( UN Committee;2001). This pertains to ethic issues of intellectual property rights. Libertarians purists contend that Rights on ideas tend to create ‘artificial scarcity and infringes on the right to own tangible property.’ This is a debatable position, especially when it also exposes rights owners of works of intellect to all manner of abuse. Thomas Jefferson takes this debate to heightened level, when , in a letter he once wrote to Isaac McPherson on August 13, 1813, submitted thus;
    If nature has made any one thing less susceptible than all others of exclusive property, it is the action of the thinking power called idea, which an individual may exclusively possess as long as he keeps it to himself; but the moment it is divulged, it forces itself into the possession of everyone, and the receiver cannot dispossess himself of it. Its peculiar character, too, is that no one possesses the less, because every other possesses the whole of. He who receives an idea from me , receives instruction himself without lessening mine; as he who lights his taper at mine, receives light without darkening me.
 I surmise that this kind of fluidity on intellectual property right  may provide the careful couching of the WIPO Document of the law on rights as ‘safeguarding creators  and other producers of intellectual goods and services by granting them certain term-limited rights to control the use made of those productions (my emphasis)
The legal instruments/regulations which govern the right of individual or an organization to control the deployment, use and dissemination of his/her/their ideas and information is referred to as intellectual property law. The rules which empower persons and institutions/organizations to exercise such controls include, among others, Copyright Law. This confers upon the creators of ‘original forms of expressions’ (earlier enumerated) exclusive rights to reproduce, adapt, publicly perform their creations. IPL also provides for Patent laws ‘enables the inventors of new products and processes to prevent others from ‘making, using, or selling their inventions.’ Thirdly, trade-secret law ‘prohibits rival companies from making use of wrongfully obtained confidential commercially valuable information. Fourth; Trademark Law empowers traders in goods and services to create words and symbols that are distinct from any others for their products so as disenable competitors from using the same or confusingly similar insignia or phrasing
All the rules and other international Agreements combine, to a large extent, and especially in the so-called developed countries to restrain consumers from copying works and programmes and rival industries from selling identical r similar programmes and works. They also impede the imitation of ‘nonfunctional design features.
The greatest obstacle to the development and growth of Intellectual Property and its owners are crippling syndicated piracy and mindless reprography. Tunde Kelani, one of the most versatile and most successful film producers in Nigeria put the grave danger in which the film producers are most graphically when he stated that the film industry ‘is in the hands of the pirates, the rest of us only have distribution licenses.’ He revealed that piracy has made raising funds to produce movies extremely difficult, besides making it impossible for filmmakers to raise revenue from their creations and products; ‘No investor, seeing this is going to put money in the industry.’ He averred that the success of the Indian Bollywood rests on the domestic support it enjoys.
The reverse is the case in the Nigerian Nollywood; ‘Our own is exploited. Nigerian films are just as aggressively pirated for verse as market.’ Moses Olaiya’s { alias Baba Sala}, Nigeria’s most illustrious theatre and film comedian was virtually wrecked by piracy. His film, Orun Mooru, produced with bank loan, was pirated, boot-legged . ‘The lack of an environment of copyright and contract law is a major stumbling block to the development of a film industry Oladitan; 1992; Olaiya 1992}Similarly, Tunde Kelani’s film, Arugba which featured some of the brightest stars in the Nigerian Nollywood was pirated, shortly after its launching was announced. It had to  be postponed because of a high profile piracy gang operating from Alaba market.
Literary works have also been widely pirated. When I was President of the Association of Nigerian Authors in 2001-5, over twenty major literary authors, including myself had their works heavily pirated, with most of the pirated highly legible but sold ridiculously cheaply. The other problem is that photocopying of most books, creative and scholarly, are mindlessly photocopied, even when the licensing laws have been in force, constitutionally, by the Nigerian Copyright Commission. All of these have made it further impossible for Intellectual Property Rights owned to make material success from the labour of their minds.
(Concluded)