Copyright Ownership in Nigeria: Authors, Joint Authors, Employers and Commissioners

A wedding videographer in Abuja films a couple’s traditional engagement ceremony and later discovers the couple has reposted clips of his footage, with his watermark removed, on a paid promotional reel for their own business. A session vocalist records the hook on what becomes a chart-topping Afrobeats single, while the actual composer wrote every note and lyric in advance. A graphic designer employed full-time by a Lagos advertising agency creates a campaign logo during work hours, then later freelances the exact same design to a rival client. In every one of these situations, the underlying creative work is plainly eligible for copyright and plainly qualifies for Nigerian protection. The question this article answers is a different one: once copyright exists, who actually owns it?

This is the question examiners return to again and again, because it sits at the intersection of statutory rules and the messy, real commercial relationships in which Nigerian creative work actually gets made: employment, commission, collaboration, and the increasingly contested territory of AI-assisted creation.

1. The General Rule: Copyright Vests in the Author

Section 28(1) of the Copyright Act 2022 states the default position plainly: except as otherwise provided in an agreement, copyright vests initially in the author of the work.¹ This is the starting point for every ownership analysis, and the burden of displacing it, through one of the statutory exceptions discussed below or through a private agreement, falls on whoever claims to be something other than the original author.

A significant, underappreciated change in the 2022 Act is procedural rather than substantive: an agreement displacing the default rule no longer needs to be in writing.² The repealed 2004 Act required a written stipulation to shift ownership away from the author. The current Act permits this to happen through an oral or even an implied agreement. This is a meaningfully riskier position for any business that engages creators informally, including small Nigerian production houses, agencies, and content studios, because an unwritten understanding that “the company owns whatever you make for us” is now, at least in principle, capable of doing exactly that legal work, with all the evidentiary difficulty that comes from trying to prove what was actually agreed when nothing was put on paper.

2. Who Counts as the “Author” Varies by Category

Before ownership can be assigned, the prior and frequently overlooked question is who the Act treats as the author in the first place, and this is not the same person in every category of work. For literary, musical, and artistic works, the author is simply the person who wrote, composed, or created the work in the ordinary sense. But for the other categories, the Act defines authorship by reference to who organised or arranged the work’s creation, not necessarily who physically performed the creative act.

For an audiovisual work, the author is the person by whom the arrangements for making the work were undertaken, generally the producer, unless the parties involved agree otherwise by contract.³ For a sound recording, the author is similarly the person by whom the arrangements for making the recording were undertaken, again typically the producer rather than the performer whose voice is on the track.⁴ For a photographic work, the author is the person who took the photograph.⁵ For a broadcast, the author is the person by whom the arrangements for the broadcast transmission were undertaken, which in practice means the broadcasting organisation.⁶ For a collective work, the author is the person responsible for the selection and arrangement of the overall collection, not the individual contributors.⁷

This has a direct and frequently misunderstood consequence for the Nigerian music industry. The session vocalist in the opening scenario above, however memorable their delivery, is not the statutory author of either the underlying musical composition, which belongs to the songwriter, or the sound recording itself, which belongs to the producer who arranged for it to be made. The vocalist’s separate and distinct entitlement arises instead from performers’ rights, a related right under the Act rather than authorship of the recording itself, a distinction that mirrors the Rome Convention framework discussed in International Copyright Conventions and Nigeria: Berne, Rome, UCC and TRIPS.

3. Employment: A Statutory Gap That Commentators Read Differently

This is the area of ownership doctrine that generates the most genuine confusion, and an honest treatment of it requires acknowledging that confusion rather than papering over it.

Section 28(2) of the Act displaces the general rule in two specific circumstances: where a person creates a work under a contract for services, or in the course of employment by a government, a ministry, department, or agency of government, or a prescribed international body.⁸ In both these circumstances, in the absence of an agreement to the contrary, ownership vests in the engaging party rather than the individual creator.

The difficulty is what this provision does not say. It does not, on a careful reading of its actual wording, extend to the most common employment scenario of all: an individual working as an ordinary employee, under a contract of service, for a private Nigerian company. Some commentary on the Act treats section 28(2) as covering all employment relationships generally, private and governmental alike, defaulting ownership to the employer across the board. Other, more careful analysis notes that the subsection’s language is specifically confined to contract-for-services arrangements and government employment, and concludes that ordinary private-sector employees, working under a contract of service for a private employer, fall back on the general rule in section 28(1): the employee, as author, retains ownership by default, displaceable only by an actual agreement to the contrary.⁹ This second reading is also the one most consistent with the structure of the repealed 2004 Act, which expressly stated that copyright belongs in the first instance to the employee-author unless a written stipulation in the employment contract says otherwise.¹⁰

For students, the honest position is this: the precise boundary of section 28(2), specifically whether it extends to ordinary private-sector employment or is confined to contract-for-services and government arrangements, has not been authoritatively settled, and legal commentators are not unanimous on the point. This is a genuine area of statutory ambiguity rather than settled doctrine, and a strong examination answer should identify it as such rather than asserting false confidence in either direction.

What is not in doubt is that, regardless of which default rule applies, Nigerian courts will enforce an explicit contractual term vesting copyright in the employer. In Joseph Ikhuoria v. Campaign Services Ltd and Anor, an employee of an advertising company created promotional works during his employment and later claimed ownership of the copyright in them. The employment contract specified that copyright in any work created or prepared for advertisement by the employee would vest in the employer. The court held, on the strength of that express contractual term, that the employer was the owner.¹¹ The case is a useful reminder that, whatever the correct default position turns out to be, a clearly drafted contract resolves the question before it ever needs to be litigated, which is precisely why well-advised Nigerian creative businesses, including production houses, agencies, and the growing number of Nigerian tech and content companies, build explicit IP assignment clauses into every employment and freelance contract rather than relying on the statutory default.

4. Commissioned Works: A Privacy-Protective Compromise

Section 28(3) of the Act addresses a scenario distinct from ordinary employment: a work specially commissioned, particularly a photograph, portrait, or audiovisual work, made for private or domestic purposes.¹² Here the Act strikes a deliberate compromise rather than simply picking a winner. The creator, the photographer or videographer, retains copyright ownership by default, in line with the general rule. But the commissioning party, the couple who hired the wedding videographer in the opening scenario, is granted a non-exclusive licence to use the work for non-commercial purposes, and critically, the right to restrain the creator from publicly disclosing or distributing the commissioned work without consent.¹³

This provision is doing genuine protective work in a country where the wedding and event photography and videography industry has grown into a substantial commercial sector in its own right. The rule recognises that a couple who pays a photographer to capture their traditional engagement ceremony has a legitimate privacy interest in controlling whether and how that footage circulates publicly, even though the photographer remains, as a matter of strict copyright law, the legal author and first owner of the images. The opening scenario runs in the opposite direction: it is the photographer’s footage being used by the commissioning couple themselves for their own commercial promotion, without the photographer’s consent. Section 28(3) does not directly resolve that particular fact pattern, since it speaks to the commissioner’s rights against the creator rather than the creator’s rights against the commissioner, but it illustrates the kind of layered, overlapping interests that section 28(3) was designed to manage, and a sharp examination answer should recognise that the creator in that scenario retains full economic rights against the couple’s reuse, the licence granted to a commissioning party under section 28(3) being limited to non-commercial use of the work, not a general right to exploit it commercially without further agreement.

5. Joint Authorship and Collective Works: A Critical Distinction

The Act draws a sharp line between two scenarios that are easy to confuse in practice: joint authorship and collective works.

A work of joint authorship is one produced by the collaboration of two or more authors whose individual contributions are inseparable or interdependent, merged into a single indivisible whole.¹⁴ Where this applies, section 30(6) of the Act vests ownership in all the co-authors jointly by default, though any individual co-author may exclude themselves from ownership by agreement, and royalties between joint owners may be apportioned by agreement even though the underlying ownership interest remains merged.¹⁵

A collective work, by contrast, is a compilation of separate, distinguishable contributions from different authors, brought together under the initiative and direction of a single person or entity. Section 29 of the Act vests ownership of the collective work as a whole in the person who initiated and directed its creation, while each individual contributor retains the separate right to exploit their own distinguishable contribution independently.¹⁶ An anthology of separately authored short stories, compiled and published under one editor’s direction, is a collective work: the editor owns the compilation as a whole, but each contributing author retains independent rights in their individual story.

This distinction matters considerably for the Nigerian music industry, where collaborative songwriting and production “camps,” common in Afrobeats production, routinely raise exactly this question: is a track jointly authored by everyone who contributed to the session, with merged, inseparable interests, or is it a collective work directed by a lead producer who assembled separable contributions from different writers and instrumentalists? Nigerian courts have not yet had occasion to draw this line authoritatively in a reported decision involving a musical work, a genuine gap given how frequently the underlying commercial dispute arises in practice. Comparative authority offers some guidance. A Ghanaian court, in CFA v. Archibong, held that copyright in a musical work rested with the composer rather than the performing artist associated with it.¹⁷ English courts, by contrast, have recognised in Hadley v. Kemp, the Spandau Ballet litigation, that band members who contributed what the court called secondary creative input, beyond simply performing a composer’s finished work, could qualify as co-authors of the resulting musical work.¹⁸ Neither case binds a Nigerian court, but both illustrate the kind of fact-specific, contribution-based analysis a Nigerian court would likely need to undertake the first time this question reaches it directly.

6. AI-Generated Content: An Open Question

The Act does not address works generated by artificial intelligence tools, and this is an area where Nigerian law has simply not yet caught up with the technology its users have already adopted. The most defensible current interpretation connects back to the “some effort” originality requirement discussed in Works Eligible for Copyright in Nigeria Under the Copyright Act 2022: if a work must reflect some human creative effort to qualify for copyright at all, then a person who meaningfully directs an AI tool, through deliberate prompt design, selection among outputs, and modification of results, may have expended the kind of effort the Act requires, making them the eligible author and first owner. A work generated with minimal or no meaningful human direction sits in considerably more doubtful territory. Nigerian courts have not yet tested this question in a reported decision, and any answer at this stage is necessarily an extrapolation from the existing statutory framework rather than settled law. A thoughtful examination answer should treat this honestly as an open question rather than asserting a confident rule the Act does not actually provide.

7. The Constitutional and Practical Stakes of the Default Rule

Where the statutory default rule sits matters enormously in practice, because default rules set the bargaining baseline from which contract negotiations begin. A young, commercially inexperienced Nigerian artist signing their first record label deal negotiates from a fundamentally different position depending on whether the law’s starting assumption is that they already own their masters and must be persuaded to give that ownership up, or that the label owns the masters by default and the artist must negotiate to claw some interest back. This is precisely the commercial reality behind the well-known industry warning that an artist who does not own their masters does not control their own career. Because copyright is property within the meaning of section 44 of the 1999 Constitution, the question of where the statutory default places that property interest is not a merely technical drafting point. It shapes who walks into a negotiation already holding something valuable, and who walks in needing to acquire it.

8. Problem Question Framework

When a problem question turns on copyright ownership, work through this sequence.

Step one: identify who the statutory author is for the relevant category of work. Remember this is not always the obvious creative contributor: for audiovisual works and sound recordings, the default author is the person who arranged the making of the work, typically the producer, not the performer.

Step two: check whether section 28(2) applies. Is the work created under a contract for services, or in the course of employment specifically by government or a prescribed international body? If so, ownership defaults to the engaging party. If the facts instead describe ordinary private-sector employment, flag the genuine statutory ambiguity discussed above, and analyse the facts under both possible readings before reaching a conclusion, explaining which reading you find more persuasive and why.

Step three: check for an express agreement. Whatever the statutory default, an actual agreement, which after the 2022 Act no longer needs to be in writing, will displace it. Look for evidence in the facts of any such agreement, written, oral, or capable of being inferred from conduct, as in Joseph Ikhuoria v. Campaign Services Ltd.

Step four: for commissioned personal or domestic works, apply section 28(3). The creator retains ownership; the commissioner receives a non-exclusive licence for non-commercial use and the right to restrain public disclosure, not a general right to exploit the work commercially.

Step five: for multi-contributor works, distinguish joint authorship from collective works. Ask whether the contributions are genuinely merged and inseparable, pointing toward joint authorship and shared ownership, or whether they are separable contributions assembled under one person’s direction, pointing toward a collective work owned by the initiating party with contributors retaining independent rights in their own pieces.

9. Common Student Mistakes

Assuming the performer of a song is automatically a co-owner of the sound recording. The statutory author of a sound recording is the person who arranged for its making, typically the producer. A performer’s rights, while real and protected, arise as a separate related right, not from authorship of the recording itself.

Treating section 28(2) as obviously covering all employment relationships. As discussed above, this is genuinely contested. An answer that simply asserts “the employer always owns work created by an employee” without engaging with the statutory language and its narrower government and contract-for-services framing is missing one of the more nuanced points this topic has to offer.

Forgetting that the 2022 Act no longer requires a written agreement to displace the default rule. Students who continue to apply the old Act’s writing requirement will misstate the current law. An oral or implied agreement can now do this work, though proving its existence and terms is, naturally, harder without a written record.

Confusing joint authorship with collective works. These trigger entirely different ownership consequences: joint authorship produces shared, merged ownership among all contributors; a collective work vests ownership of the whole in the initiating party while leaving separable individual contributions in the hands of their respective authors.

Concluding that a commissioner of a personal photograph or video owns the copyright outright. Section 28(3) gives the commissioner only a non-exclusive licence for non-commercial use and a right against public disclosure, not ownership of the copyright itself, which remains with the creator absent a separate agreement.

10. Quick Reference Table

11. Key Cases

Joseph Ikhuoria v. Campaign Services Ltd and Anor confirms that an explicit contractual term vesting copyright in an employer will be enforced by Nigerian courts, regardless of how the underlying statutory default question is ultimately resolved. The case is a practical illustration of why clear contractual drafting matters more than reliance on default statutory rules.

MultiChoice (Nig) Ltd v. M.C.S.N. Ltd/Gte (2020) 13 NWLR (Pt. 1742) 415 addressed the personal and creative significance of musical works in the context of moral rights, recognising that a musical composition or performance represents more than a mechanical assembly of notes and lyrics, but reflects the artist’s creative identity, a principle relevant to how Nigerian courts are likely to approach contested authorship and ownership questions in the music industry going forward.

CFA v. Archibong (Ghana) and Hadley v. Kemp (England and Wales) are comparative, non-binding authorities relevant to the unresolved Nigerian question of whether a performer’s creative contribution to a musical work can rise to the level of co-authorship. Their differing outcomes, composer-only ownership in the Ghanaian case against recognition of secondary creative contributions in the English case, illustrate the range of plausible approaches available to a Nigerian court the first time this question is squarely presented.

Footnotes

¹ Section 28(1), Copyright Act 2022.

² Q&A: Copyright Ownership and Transfer in Nigeria, Lexology (2024), noting that, unlike the repealed Act, the 2022 Act does not require an agreement modifying author ownership to be in writing.

³ Section 108, Copyright Act 2022 (definition of “author,” audiovisual work).

⁴ Section 108, Copyright Act 2022 (definition of “author,” sound recording).

⁵ Section 108, Copyright Act 2022 (definition of “author,” photographic work).

⁶ Section 108, Copyright Act 2022 (definition of “author,” broadcast).

⁷ Section 108, Copyright Act 2022 (definition of “author,” collective work); Section 29, Copyright Act 2022.

⁸ Section 28(2), Copyright Act 2022.

⁹ Compare Mondaq, ‘Copyright Comparative Guide: Nigeria’ (2025), treating employer ownership as the general rule for any contract of service, with Preem & Partners, ‘Understanding Copyright Ownership Under the Nigerian Copyright Act 2022: Who Owns What?’ (2024), concluding by inference that section 28(2) does not explicitly extend to private-sector employees under an ordinary contract of service.

¹⁰ Section 10, Copyright Act, Cap C28, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 (repealed), and its predecessor provision in the 1990 consolidation, requiring a written stipulation to displace employee ownership.

¹¹ Joseph Ikhuoria v. Campaign Services Ltd and Anor, discussed in Preem & Partners (n 9).

¹² Section 28(3), Copyright Act 2022.

¹³ Mondaq, ‘Copyright Comparative Guide: Nigeria’ (n 9), describing the commissioner’s non-exclusive licence for non-commercial use and right to restrain public disclosure under Section 28(3).

¹⁴ Section 108, Copyright Act 2022 (definition of “work of joint authorship”).

¹⁵ Section 30(6), Copyright Act 2022.

¹⁶ Section 29, Copyright Act 2022.

¹⁷ CFA v. Archibong, discussed in ‘Sounds and Songs: Evaluating the Balance of Rights in Artistes and Record Label Arrangements,’ Lexology (2021).

¹⁸ Hadley v. Kemp [1999] EMLR 589, discussed in Lexology (n 17).