Economic Rights of Copyright Owners in Nigeria

A hotel in Victoria Island plays a curated playlist of Afrobeats music in its lobby and poolside areas, seven days a week, to create atmosphere for paying guests. A cable television provider transmits music videos and films carrying background scores composed by Nigerian artists. A streaming platform makes an Afrobeats album available for on-demand listening anywhere in the world. In all three scenarios, copyrighted works are being commercially exploited by parties who have not created them. The question this article answers is what rights the creators and rights holders actually hold against these parties, and what the Copyright Act 2022 gives them the power to do or authorise.

Economic rights are the commercially exploitable entitlements that flow from copyright ownership. They are the rights that translate a copyright interest from a legal abstraction into actual income, and understanding them precisely, not as a vague general right to “own your music” but as a specific set of enumerated acts that only the rights holder may authorise, is essential for answering examination questions about copyright infringement, licensing, and royalties.

1. Economic Rights Distinguished from Moral Rights

Nigerian copyright law divides the rights of an author into two distinct categories: economic rights and moral rights. Moral Rights in Nigerian Copyright Law deals with the second category in detail. This article addresses the first.

The distinction matters because the two categories behave very differently in law. Economic rights are property rights. They can be assigned, licensed, inherited, sold, or transferred by the holder to any third party. A songwriter can sell all their economic rights to a record label and retain nothing. Moral rights, by contrast, are personal rights attached to the author’s connection to the work. They cannot be fully assigned away, because the 2022 Act preserves certain of them in the author’s person regardless of what has been done with the economic rights.¹ An author who assigns all economic rights in a musical composition to a label still retains the moral right to be identified as the composer and to object to distortions that harm their reputation.

For the purpose of this article, economic rights are the rights that generate revenue: the rights to say who may reproduce the work, who may perform it publicly, who may broadcast it, who may put it on a streaming platform, and who may adapt it into a new form.

2. The Statutory Framework: Sections 9 to 13

The Copyright Act 2022 lays out economic rights category by category in sections 9 to 13. Rather than a single universal bundle, each category of eligible work carries a tailored set of rights appropriate to the nature of that work. Students who confuse the specific rights attached to one category with those attached to another category produce incorrect answers.

Section 9: Literary and Musical Works. Copyright in a literary or musical work is the exclusive right to do or authorise any of the following acts: reproduce the work; publish the work; perform the work in public; produce, reproduce, perform, or publish any translation of the work; make any audiovisual work or record in respect of the work; distribute to the public for commercial purposes copies of the work through sale or other transfer of ownership; broadcast the work; communicate the work to the public; make the work available to the public by wire or wireless means in such a way that members of the public are able to access the work from a place and at a time independently chosen by them; make any adaptation of the work; and do in relation to a translation or adaptation any of the above acts.²

Section 10: Artistic Works. Copyright in an artistic work is the exclusive right to reproduce the work, publish the work, include the work in an audiovisual production, broadcast the work, communicate the work to the public, make the work available to the public by wire or wireless means in the on-demand manner described above, and do in relation to any adaptation any of the above acts.³

Section 11: Audiovisual Works. Copyright in an audiovisual work covers reproduction, publication, broadcasting, communication to the public, the making-available right, causing the audiovisual work to be seen in public where it consists of visual images or heard in public where it consists of sounds, making any copy of the soundtrack, making a translation of the work, and doing in relation to any adaptation the above acts. Importantly, the 2022 Act also gives the owner of an audiovisual work’s copyright the right to receive adequate remuneration where the work is broadcast.⁴

Section 12: Sound Recordings. Copyright in a sound recording covers reproduction, distribution to the public for commercial purposes by way of rental, lease, hire, or loan, distribution through sale or other transfer of ownership where the work has not already been the subject of an authorised distribution, broadcasting, communication to the public, and the making-available right.⁵

Section 13: Broadcasts. Copyright in a broadcast covers re-broadcasting, communication to the public of television broadcasts, and distribution to the public of copies of the broadcast for commercial purposes. The right to take still photographs from a television broadcast is also specifically controlled.⁶

3. The Making-Available Right: The Most Significant Addition in the 2022 Act

Across every category of work, the 2022 Act now includes what is commonly called the “making available” right: the exclusive right to make the work available to the public by wire or wireless means in such a way that members of the public are able to access the work from a place and at a time independently chosen by them.⁷ This formulation, which mirrors the language of the WIPO Copyright Treaty discussed in International Copyright Conventions and Nigeria: Berne, Rome, UCC and TRIPS, describes precisely what Netflix does with films, what Spotify does with music, and what YouTube does with video content. Users choose their own time and place of access; works are streamed or downloaded on demand rather than broadcast at a fixed time.

The repealed Copyright Act Cap C28 LFN 2004 had no equivalent provision. This created a genuine legal gap: Nollywood productions and Afrobeats tracks were being distributed on global streaming platforms, generating streaming revenues that were sometimes disputed between creators and platforms, while the domestic Nigerian statute literally did not address the underlying right. The 2022 Act fills this gap, and the making-available right is now the single most commercially important addition to the Nigerian copyright framework for the music and film industries. Any licensing negotiation between a Nigerian rights holder and a streaming platform, and any dispute about unauthorised distribution of Nigerian content on digital platforms, will now turn on the scope and exercise of this right.

4. Remuneration for the Broadcast of Sound Recordings: A Historical Gap Corrected

Before the 2022 Act, Nigerian copyright law contained an anomaly that the music industry had complained about for years. The broadcast right in the repealed Act gave the owner of copyright in a literary, musical, or artistic work the right to be remunerated when that work was broadcast. But there was no equivalent right for the owner of copyright in the sound recording of that work. This meant that a radio station broadcasting a recorded song owed nothing to the record producer who owned the copyright in the recording itself, and potentially nothing to the performer whose voice was on the track, even while the radio station was generating advertising revenue from the broadcast.

The 2022 Act corrects this by granting performers and owners of sound recordings the right to adequate remuneration whenever their work is broadcast.⁸ Where the parties cannot agree on the level of remuneration, the Nigerian Copyright Commission may determine it. This change aligns Nigerian law with the framework anticipated by the Rome Convention and has direct commercial consequences for Nigerian radio and television broadcasters, hospitality businesses using background music, and digital streaming platforms.

The practical enforcement of this right runs directly through the collective management organisation system. Rights holders, particularly in the music industry, cannot individually monitor and negotiate with every broadcaster, hotel, streaming service, and events venue using their work. Collective management organisations, known as CMOs, act on behalf of large groups of rights holders to licence their catalogues and collect and distribute royalties. Under the Copyright Act 2022, a CMO must be registered with the Nigerian Copyright Commission before it can legally demand or collect royalties on behalf of copyright owners.⁹

This brings us to one of the more turbulent and under-documented aspects of the Nigerian copyright enforcement landscape. The Music Copyright Society Nigeria, MCSN, was for many years the principal CMO claiming rights over musical works assigned to it by international organisations, including the Performing Rights Society and the Mechanical Copyright Protection Society of the United Kingdom. The Copyright Society of Nigeria, COSON, was a rival CMO that obtained approval from the Nigerian Copyright Commission in 2010 but had its licence suspended in 2018 following a governance dispute in its leadership. Between them, MCSN and COSON engaged in a prolonged public dispute over which body had the authority to collect and distribute royalties for Nigerian and internationally assigned musical works, a dispute that produced significant litigation and considerable confusion for broadcasters and music users trying to identify the correct party to licence their activities. The case of Multichoice (Nig) Ltd v. MCSN Ltd/Gte (discussed in section 12 below) arose directly from this contested landscape.

5. The Resale Royalty Right

Section 17 of the Act introduces a right that was entirely absent from the repealed Act: the resale royalty, sometimes called the droit de suite in civil law tradition. This is an inalienable right, meaning it cannot be assigned or waived, given to the authors of graphic works, three-dimensional works, and literary or musical manuscripts to a share in the proceeds whenever the original work or manuscript is resold at public auction or through a dealer.¹⁰

This right has direct relevance to Nigerian visual artists and, potentially, to authors of original musical manuscripts. An artist whose painting was originally sold for a modest sum in the 1990s and subsequently changes hands at auction for millions of naira now has a legal entitlement to a share in that secondary sale proceeds, regardless of any earlier transaction in which the copyright may have been transferred. The right is inalienable because Section 17 says so expressly, meaning it survives even a purported full assignment of economic rights, and it is inheritable, passing to the author’s heirs and successors on death.

The conditions governing how this right is exercised, including the percentage share, the mechanism for claiming it, and what constitutes a “dealer” sale within its scope, are to be set by Nigerian Copyright Commission regulations. These regulations were, at the time the 2022 Act commenced in March 2023, still in development.

6. The Scope of Rights: Whole or Substantial Part

Every economic right discussed above extends to the doing of the controlled act in relation to the whole of the work or any substantial part of it.¹¹ This is not a trivial qualifier. It means that a defendant cannot escape liability for copyright infringement simply by copying only a portion of a work, provided the portion taken is substantial.

What makes a taking “substantial” is a matter of quality rather than quantity. This principle, established in English case law and consistently applied in Nigeria, means that taking a small portion of a work can still amount to infringement of the reproduction right if what was taken was the most distinctive, original, or commercially valuable part of the work. A songwriter who lifts the eight-bar chorus from another songwriter’s song has taken a qualitatively substantial part of that work even though the chorus may constitute only fifteen percent of the song’s total duration. A novelist who copies three paragraphs from another novel’s climactic scene has potentially taken a qualitatively substantial part even though the three paragraphs are numerically insignificant compared to the full text. The detailed analysis of what qualifies as substantial in individual cases is addressed in Copyright Infringement in Nigeria: Elements, Defences and Burden of Proof.

7. The Distribution Right and the Exhaustion Doctrine

Section 9(f) of the Act restricts the distribution right for literary and musical works to copies “which have not been subject to distribution authorised by the owner.”¹² This is the Nigerian statutory expression of what comparative copyright law calls the exhaustion doctrine or first-sale doctrine. Once the rights holder, or someone acting with the rights holder’s authorisation, has put a lawfully made copy of the work on the market by sale or other transfer of ownership, the rights holder’s distribution right in that specific copy is exhausted. The subsequent buyer can resell, lend, or give away that specific copy without infringing the distribution right, because the rights holder has already exercised and received their economic reward from the first distribution.

This doctrine matters in two practical scenarios of relevance to the Nigerian market. First, it clarifies that second-hand book markets and second-hand music markets are not, in themselves, infringing, where the goods being sold are genuine copies first distributed with the rights holder’s consent. Second, the doctrine applies to territorial distribution: whether a copy of a work first distributed in the United Kingdom exhausts the Nigerian rights holder’s distribution right in Nigeria is a question about whether exhaustion applies nationally or internationally. The Act does not expressly resolve this question, and it is one that will eventually require judicial determination with significant consequences for the importation and parallel trading of copyright goods.

8. The Constitutional Tension: Section 39 and the Communication Right

The communication right and the making-available right together give the copyright owner control over virtually every form of public dissemination of a work in the digital age. This comprehensive control sits in some tension with section 39 of the 1999 Constitution, which guarantees the right to receive and impart information and ideas freely.¹³ Information, academic knowledge, and creative works are precisely what section 39 is concerned with, and a copyright owner who exercises communication and making-available rights to prevent access by the public, for example by refusing to licence a work for educational distribution, can effectively use a statutory property right to override a constitutional freedom of access.

The Act addresses this tension partly through the fair dealing provisions in Part II, which create space for information flow, education, and criticism outside the copyright owner’s control. The compulsory licensing provisions in sections 31, 32, and 35, through which the Nigerian Copyright Commission can issue licences on behalf of an unreasonably withholding rights holder to enable translation, reproduction for educational purposes, or use in the public interest, provide a further constitutional safety valve. Whether these provisions are sufficient to satisfy the constitutional standard under section 39 is a genuine analytical question that Nigerian courts have not yet authoritatively resolved. Property rights under section 44 of the Constitution also inform this analysis: the compulsory licensing mechanism, where it forces a rights holder to licence their work whether or not they wish to, itself raises the question of whether the statutory authorisation for such licences meets the constitutional standard for interference with property.

9. The Enforcement Reality: CMOs, Royalty Gaps, and the Hotel Lobby Problem

For Nigerian students, understanding the economic rights as a bundle of legal entitlements is only half the picture. Understanding how, and how poorly, those entitlements are actually enforced in practice is the other half.

The hotel in Victoria Island that plays Afrobeats in its lobby is using someone’s copyrighted works. The radio station that broadcasts a recorded track is using the sound recording producer’s copyright and the performer’s related right. The streaming platform carrying Nollywood films is engaging the audiovisual copyright and the making-available right. In theory, every one of these uses requires a licence, and every one of them should generate royalties flowing back to rights holders. In practice, the volume of unlicensed use of copyrighted works in Nigeria across the broadcasting, hospitality, and digital sectors remains high, and the system for collecting and distributing royalties, dependent on functioning CMOs, has for years been disrupted by the COSON licensing suspension and the broader MCSN-COSON rivalry.

The 2022 Act represents a legislative attempt to stabilise this system, improving CMO governance requirements, extending the right to adequate remuneration for broadcast of sound recordings, and introducing digital enforcement tools. But the gap between statutory entitlement and actual royalty income for the typical Nigerian musician, film producer, or novelist remains wide, and students who understand why this gap exists and what institutional and regulatory mechanisms are supposed to close it will give richer, more analytical answers than those who simply recite the statutory rights without engaging with the market in which those rights must operate.

10. Problem Question Framework

When a problem question tests economic rights, work through it as follows.

Identify which category of work is in issue. Apply the correct section: section 9 for literary or musical works, section 10 for artistic works, section 11 for audiovisual works, section 12 for sound recordings, section 13 for broadcasts. Do not import rights from one section into another.

Identify the specific act being done. Is the defendant reproducing the work, performing it publicly, broadcasting it, distributing copies for commercial purposes, or making it available on demand? Match the act to the specific right listed in the relevant section. If the act does not fall within the listed rights, there is no infringement of the economic rights, however morally objectionable the use may seem.

Check whether the whole work or a substantial part was involved. Apply the qualitative test: was the portion taken the most distinctive or valuable part, regardless of its proportional size?

Check whether the distribution right has been exhausted. Where the defendant is reselling or transferring a copy of the work, ask whether that copy was originally put on the market by or with the authority of the rights holder, in which case the exhaustion doctrine applies.

For digital uses, apply the making-available right. On-demand streaming, download services, and any system where the public accesses the work at a time and place of their choosing engages section 9(i) rather than the broadcast right in section 9(g), though in practice both may be engaged simultaneously.

For CMO involvement, check their registration status. Under the Act, an unregistered CMO cannot sue for infringement in respect of rights it purports to manage. This is one of the points that Multichoice raised in its litigation against MCSN.

11. Common Student Mistakes

Treating “copyright” as a single undivided right. Copyright in Nigeria is a bundle of distinct enumerated rights, each of which can be separately licensed or assigned. A licence to perform a musical work in public does not carry with it the right to record the performance. A licence to broadcast a sound recording does not automatically include the right to distribute it commercially. Students must identify the specific right at issue.

Confusing the broadcast right with the making-available right. Broadcasting involves transmission at a fixed time to an audience that receives the work simultaneously. The making-available right involves providing access that members of the public can exercise at any time of their own choosing. These are two separate rights in the Act. Netflix and radio are not the same legal thing.

Applying sound recording rights to the underlying musical composition. The copyright in a sound recording under section 12 is a separate right from the copyright in the underlying musical work under section 9. Licensing one does not automatically licence the other. This is the distinction that the COSON/MCSN litigation has repeatedly turned on in practice.

Treating commercial distribution and gratuitous distribution as equivalent. The distribution right in section 9(f) applies to distribution for commercial purposes. Non-commercial distribution of copies may engage the communication right or the reproduction right but is not straightforwardly covered by the distribution provision.

Ignoring the resale royalty right as a separate, inalienable economic right. Students focusing on the core reproduction and communication rights often overlook section 17 entirely. The resale royalty right is economically distinct, inalienable in a way that the other economic rights are not, and examinable as a novelty of the 2022 Act.

12. Quick Reference Table

13. Key Cases

Multichoice (Nig) Ltd v. MCSN Ltd/Gte (2020) 13 NWLR (Pt. 1742) 415 is the most important Nigerian decision on the exercise of economic rights in the broadcasting context. The Court of Appeal (Lagos Division) upheld a finding that Multichoice Nigeria infringed the copyright in musical works owned by the Musical Copyright Society Nigeria, MCSN, by communicating those works to the public through its DSTV platform without licence or payment of royalties. The court awarded N5.4 billion in special damages. Critically, the court held that an assignee or exclusive licensee of copyright works, even one whose collecting society licence has been revoked, retains the right to sue for infringement as the owner or exclusive licensee of the underlying rights, distinct from its role as a CMO collecting royalties on behalf of others. The case is essential reading on the communication right, the standing of rights holders to sue, and the intersection of the CMO framework with the substantive economic rights of copyright owners.

NCC v. Tony Okoroji and Ors confirms that a collecting society whose licence has been suspended by the Nigerian Copyright Commission cannot legally demand or collect royalties during that suspension period, illustrating how the CMO registration system functions as a gatekeeping mechanism for economic rights enforcement.

Footnotes

¹ Section 14(2), Copyright Act 2022.

² Section 9, Copyright Act 2022.

³ Section 10, Copyright Act 2022.

⁴ Section 11, Copyright Act 2022.

⁵ Section 12, Copyright Act 2022.

⁶ Section 13, Copyright Act 2022.

⁷ Banwo & Ighodalo, ‘Implications of the Copyright Act on the Entertainment and Advertising Industries in Nigeria’ (2024), describing the new making-available right as extending copyright expressly to on-demand digital platforms.

⁸ Mondaq, ‘A Review of the Copyright Act of 2022’ (2024), noting that the 2022 Act introduces the right to adequate remuneration for performers and sound recording owners upon broadcast, addressing a gap in the repealed Act.

⁹ Section 39(4), Copyright Act 2022 (equivalent provision under the 2022 Act framework governing CMOs).

¹⁰ Section 17, Copyright Act 2022.

¹¹ Sections 9-13, Copyright Act 2022, each applying the rights to the whole or any substantial part of the work.

¹² Section 9(f), Copyright Act 2022.

¹³ Section 39(1), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.