Digital Copyright Challenges: Reconciling the Copyrights Holders’ Rights and the Internet Intermediaries’ Secondary Liability for Copyright Infringement in Nigeria

The central focus of this thesis is the examination of the adequacy of Nigerian copyright law in striking an appropriate balance between the protection of copyright holders’ right in the digital environment vis-à-vis the need to safeguard online intermediaries from secondary liability and the lessons that Nigeria may learn from the United Kingdom and the United States in reforming its own law.
The research follows three lines of investigation. First, it explores the development of copyright law in Nigeria. Through historical and legal analysis, it provides an understanding of factors that have influenced copyright protection in Nigeria. It argues that the protection of copyright and other intellectual property is not new in Nigeria but its purpose and character are different. Second, focusing on the reproduction right and the right of communication to the public, it undertakes a textual analysis of the international attempts to retrofit the exclusive rights of authors within the internet challenges through the Berne Convention and the WIPO Copyright Treaty. This analysis is followed by the consideration of national implementation in the United Kingdom and the United States and the assessment of the Nigeria Copyright Act 1988 to combat online piracy. Third, the research introduces an independent but related area of the research: secondary copyright liability and internet intermediaries’ immunity or safe harbour. It analyses the legal rules for imposing secondary liability for third-party copyright infringing acts. It examine the less theorised secondary copyright liability in Nigeria after which considers the development of the doctrine of ‘authorisation’ in the UK and the heads of liability in the US. Having established these parameters, it investigated the many false starts in creating safe harbours for internet intermediaries in Nigeria before evaluating the principles and conditions ensconced in the EU E-Commerce Directive as transposed into the UK’s E-Commerce Regulation and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act for intermediaries’ immunity.
Finally, this research concludes by drawing together various themes examined throughout the research in making recommendations on how Nigeria could reform its copyright law. It integrates Nigeria’s Draft Copyright Bill 2015 into its recommendation and warns that the Bill has not satisfactorily struck the balance. The research concludes that Nigeria could learn from the strengths and weaknesses of both the United Kingdom and United States as the search for reconciliation continues.