Copyright in Computer Programs and Digital Works in Nigeria

Walk into any computer repair shop in Alaba International Market or along Computer Village in Ikeja and you will almost certainly find Windows and Microsoft Office being installed on customer machines from bootleg discs or USB drives, for a small fee. Visit any Nigerian university campus and you will find students using pirated versions of SPSS, AutoCAD, and Adobe Creative Suite without a second thought. The Nigerian software market, by most credible estimates, has historically had software piracy rates among the highest in the world, a situation that persisted for decades in part because the old copyright framework provided inadequate clarity about how copyright law applies to computer programs and insufficient tools to enforce it in the digital environment.

The Copyright Act 2022 changes this substantially. It gives computer programs express statutory recognition as literary works, introduces new protections for digital rights management systems, creates a notice-and-takedown framework for online infringement, and empowers the Nigerian Copyright Commission to block access to infringing websites. For students, this article bridges the general copyright doctrine of earlier articles in this cluster with the specific questions that arise when the work in issue is software, a database, or any other work whose primary existence is in digital form.

1. Computer Programs as Literary Works: Section 108

The most fundamental rule in Nigerian copyright law as it applies to software is also the simplest: section 108 of the Copyright Act 2022 expressly classifies computer programs as literary works.¹ This classification has cascading consequences that govern every other question in this area.

Because a computer program is a literary work, all the eligibility conditions for literary works apply to it. It must be original in the sense established in Plateau Publishing Co. Ltd v. Adophy: the code must be the independent product of the programmer’s own creative effort, not copied from another program’s code. It must be fixed in a medium from which it can be perceived or reproduced, which in software terms means written to a storage medium, whether that is a hard drive, a USB drive, a server, or a cloud storage system. The “some effort” threshold under section 2(2) applies: even a short script or a simple utility program qualifies, provided some creative effort was expended in writing it.² A programmer who writes even a modest piece of original code in Python, JavaScript, or any other programming language has created a literary work eligible for copyright under Nigerian law.

Because a computer program is a literary work, all the economic rights available under section 9 attach to it: the right to reproduce, publish, adapt, distribute, communicate to the public, and make available on demand. A software developer holds the exclusive right to decide who may copy, install, modify, or make available their code. Every act of installing an unlicensed copy of software engages the reproduction right. Every act of distributing pirated software, whether physically on a disc or digitally over a network, engages the distribution and communication rights. The person who provides the bootleg installation service in Alaba Market is not operating in a legal grey area; they are reproducing and distributing copyrighted literary works without any authorisation from the rights holder.

Because a computer program is a literary work, the full copyright duration applies: the programmer’s copyright lasts for seventy years after the end of the year in which the programmer dies, calculated on the basis discussed in Duration of Copyright in Nigeria Under the Copyright Act 2022. For corporate employers who own the program through a contract-for-services arrangement, the same logic applies to the human authors whose code vests in the employer as a matter of ownership, while the underlying duration rules track the authors.

2. What Copyright Protects in Software: The Code, Not the Functionality

One of the most practically significant questions in software copyright is what exactly the copyright protects. The answer, under Nigerian law as under every copyright system, is the specific expression of the program in code, not the underlying idea, algorithm, or functionality that the code implements.

This is the software application of the idea-expression dichotomy discussed in Works Eligible for Copyright in Nigeria Under the Copyright Act 2022 and Copyright Infringement in Nigeria: Elements, Defences and Burden of Proof. A developer who writes an accounting application that calculates payroll tax using a specific algorithmic approach holds copyright in the specific code they wrote to implement that approach. They do not hold copyright in the algorithmic approach itself, in the functionality of payroll calculation generally, or in any particular mathematical formula. A competitor who writes their own payroll application using the same mathematical approach, in their own code, from scratch, without copying a single line from the original program, does not infringe. Only copying the actual code, the specific expression in which the original programmer’s creative choices are embodied, is potentially infringing.

This principle has been clearly articulated in comparative case law that Nigerian courts are likely to follow when the question arises in a direct Nigerian authority. In Navitaire Inc. v. easyJet Airline Co. (UK), the court held that copyright in software does not extend to the functionality or business logic of the program, meaning that a competitor who writes a program with exactly the same features and user experience as the original, without copying any underlying code, does not infringe. In Nova Productions v. Mazooma Games Ltd (UK), the Court of Appeal confirmed that ideas embedded in software, including combinations of ideas, remain unprotected regardless of how much skill went into formulating them. These authorities from England and Wales are not binding on Nigerian courts but represent the mainstream global interpretation of software copyright, and a Nigerian court approaching this question for the first time would be expected to reach consistent conclusions.³

The critical practical application in Nigeria is the distinction between object code and source code. The source code of a program is the human-readable instructions written by the programmer. The object code is the compiled, machine-executable version of the same program. Copyright protection extends to both: a pirated disc containing the object code of Windows or a Nigerian-built app is an infringing copy in exactly the same way that a disc containing the source code would be, because both are reproductions of a protected literary work.

3. Databases: Section 108 and Compilation Copyright

Section 108 of the Act also expressly includes databases within the definition of literary works by classifying them as “written tables and compilations, including compilations of data stored or embodied in a computer or any medium.”⁴ This is the Nigerian statutory basis for database copyright.

The critical qualification is that the copyright in a database does not protect the individual data points or facts contained in it, but only the selection, arrangement, and organisation of those data points, to the extent that such selection and arrangement reflects creative effort.⁵ A company that has spent years accumulating a database of Nigerian business contacts, court decisions, or financial records holds copyright in the database as a whole if the way the data is selected and structured reflects original creative choices, but it does not hold copyright in any individual contact detail, court citation, or financial figure that it has recorded. Any person is free to use the individual data points without infringing, provided they do not reproduce the database as a structured whole.

This has significant practical consequences for the growing Nigerian legal technology and fintech sectors. A startup that builds a database of Nigerian case law summaries, structured and tagged in a particular way, holds copyright in that database structure and presentation. A competitor cannot simply copy the database wholesale. But the competitor is free to access the underlying court decisions themselves, which are government works covered by section 7 of the Act, and build their own independently structured database of the same decisions. The data is free; the creative organisation of the data is protected.

Nigeria does not currently have a standalone database right equivalent to the European Union’s sui generis database protection, which protects substantial investment in the collection of data even where no creative selection or arrangement is involved. A company that has invested significant resources in assembling a database of raw facts, without making creative choices about what to include or how to organise it, may find that copyright protection does not extend to that investment, because the database fails the originality requirement. This is a gap in the Nigerian IP framework that has not yet been addressed legislatively.

4. Permitted Acts for Software: The Section 20(2) Exceptions

Section 20(2) of the Act creates specific exceptions that apply to computer programs and that do not require the fair dealing analysis discussed in Fair Dealing in Nigerian Copyright Law: What Changed Under the 2022 Act.⁶ These exceptions recognise that certain acts in relation to software are ordinary and necessary incidents of legitimate use that should not require separate licence.

A lawful user of a computer program may make a back-up copy of the program for archival purposes without infringing copyright.⁷ This exception exists because software is inherently fragile: a disc can be scratched, a hard drive can fail, and a user who has legitimately purchased a software licence should not be required to go back to the marketplace every time a copy is lost or corrupted. A back-up copy made for archival purposes by the lawful user is not an infringement even though it is technically a reproduction of the program.

A lawful user may also observe, study, or test the functioning of the program in order to understand the ideas or principles underlying any element of the program while performing permitted loading, displaying, running, transmitting, or storage.⁸ This exception is specifically designed to protect reverse engineering for interoperability purposes: a developer who legitimately runs a program and observes how it behaves is not infringing even if that observation gives them insight into the underlying ideas or algorithms, because ideas are not protectable and the developer is only observing the program’s expression in the course of permitted use.

These exceptions are non-waivable in the sense that a contractual term purporting to prevent a lawful user from making a backup copy or from studying the program’s functioning is void under section 20(3) of the Act, the same anti-override provision discussed in the fair dealing article. End-user licence agreements (EULAs) that attempt to restrict these permitted acts have no legal force in Nigeria.

5. Technological Protection Measures: Section 50

Section 50 of the Act creates a new category of protection that did not exist under the repealed 2004 Act: the prohibition on circumventing technological protection measures.⁹ A technological protection measure, often abbreviated as TPM and sometimes called digital rights management or DRM, is any technology, device, or component that controls access to a copyrighted work or restricts the acts that may be performed in relation to it in the ordinary course of its operation.

The provision prohibits the circumvention of a TPM that effectively protects a work: acts such as bypassing, avoiding, removing, deactivating, or decrypting a digital lock without the authorisation of the rights holder. It also prohibits the manufacture, importation, distribution, sale, rental, or provision of devices, products, or components, or services, that are primarily designed for the purpose of circumventing a TPM, or that have limited commercial purpose other than circumvention.

For Nigerian students, the most common examples of what this provision now criminalises are the tools used to install pirated software: key generators that produce fake product licence keys, crack files that modify software to disable licence verification, and patch programs that circumvent the activation requirements of legitimately purchased programs. These tools are now separately prohibited by section 50, quite apart from the underlying question of whether the software they enable access to is itself an infringing copy.

There is a genuine constitutional tension embedded in TPM protection that this article should surface explicitly. Section 50 protects the rights holder’s ability to use technology to limit access to their work, including in ways that may prevent a user from exercising the fair dealing rights that section 20 of the Act expressly preserves. A user who has legitimately purchased access to an academic database and wishes to exercise their non-commercial research exception under section 20(1)(a) may find that the platform’s DRM system prevents the kind of bulk downloading or format-shifting that the research purpose would require. The Act’s anti-override provision in section 20(3) voids contractual restrictions on fair dealing acts, but it is less clear whether it also overrides technical restrictions on those same acts. This is a genuine legislative lacuna: the Act protects TPMs without expressly carving out the space that fair dealing users need, and it has not yet been resolved by any Nigerian judicial decision.

6. Rights Management Information: Section 51

Section 51 of the Act prohibits the knowing falsification, alteration, or removal of rights management information attached to a copyrighted work.¹⁰ Rights management information is the embedded data that identifies the work, identifies the author or rights holder, and specifies the terms under which the work may be used: metadata, digital watermarks, embedded copyright notices, and similar information.

The specific Nollywood and Afrobeats relevance of this provision is direct. Pirated Nollywood films are routinely stripped of their original production company watermarks and re-uploaded to social media platforms and video-sharing services without attribution. Afrobeats tracks distributed as MP3 files are frequently stripped of their embedded metadata tags identifying the composer, the record label, and the copyright year before being redistributed. Section 51 now makes both of these acts criminal offences distinct from the underlying copyright infringement, and it makes possession of a work whose rights management information has been removed or altered, knowing that it has been tampered with, separately punishable.

This provision connects directly to the enforcement interest of the Nigerian Copyright Commission in tracking and removing infringing content from digital platforms. Rights management information, when intact, enables automated systems to identify copyrighted content and apply rights holder instructions about how that content may be used. The Nigerian digital enforcement framework in Part VII of the Act, discussed in section 7 below, depends in part on rights management information being available for the identification of infringing copies.

7. The Online Content Framework: Part VII

Part VII of the Copyright Act 2022 is the most consequential addition the Act makes to Nigerian copyright law in the digital environment, and it deserves careful attention from students because nothing equivalent existed under the old Act.

Section 54: Notice and Takedown. A rights holder who discovers that an online service provider is hosting infringing content may serve a takedown notice on the service provider, specifying the work claimed, the location of the infringing content, and sufficient information to identify the claimant as the rights holder or their authorised agent.¹¹ On receiving a valid notice, the service provider must expeditiously remove or disable access to the infringing content. The subscriber whose content is removed is entitled to a counter-notice disputing the infringement claim, and if a counter-notice is filed the service provider may restore the content after a prescribed period unless the rights holder files for court action. A service provider who fails to comply with a valid takedown notice, or who knowingly facilitates infringement, loses the safe harbour protection discussed in Remedies for Copyright Infringement in Nigeria: Civil and Criminal Action and may be held liable for the infringement.

Section 56: Repeat Infringers. A service provider must implement a policy for the suspension or termination of accounts of repeat copyright infringers.¹² Failure to implement and enforce such a policy is a ground on which the service provider loses safe harbour protection. This provision is modelled on the “three strikes” approach adopted in various forms by copyright enforcement systems in other jurisdictions, adapted for the Nigerian regulatory context.

Section 61: Website Blocking. The Nigerian Copyright Commission has the power to block or disable access to any content, link, or website that it reasonably believes infringes copyright, notwithstanding the provisions of any other law, either directly or with the assistance of internet service providers.¹³ The penalty for operating a website or hosting content that the Commission has determined to be infringing, without compliance with the blocking order, is a fine of not less than one million naira or imprisonment for a term of not less than five years, or both.

The website-blocking power under section 61 is the provision in the entire 2022 Act that sits in the most direct tension with section 39 of the 1999 Constitution. Section 39 guarantees the freedom to receive and impart information and ideas without interference. A website blocking order by the NCC, if broadly applied, is an act of state-compelled restriction of information flow that engages this fundamental right. Courts in other jurisdictions have subjected administrative website blocking powers to strict proportionality review. Whether Nigerian courts will apply a similar standard of constitutional review to NCC blocking orders under section 61 remains to be seen: no such review has yet been conducted since the Act commenced in March 2023, and the question is live.

8. The Microsoft v. Franike Legacy: What the 2022 Act Changes for Foreign Software Companies

One of the most significant practical consequences of the 2022 Act for the Nigerian software market flows from the removal of the old section 41, the ministerial gazette notice requirement that produced the Microsoft v. Franike decision discussed in Conditions for Copyright Protection in Nigeria: Originality, Fixation and Qualifying Factors.¹⁴

As detailed in that article, Nigerian courts in the Microsoft v. Franike line of cases held that a foreign software company could not maintain a copyright infringement action in Nigeria without producing a Ministerial Gazette notice extending the Act’s protection to works from its home country. This had the practical effect of making the Nigerian copyright framework largely unenforceable by the major foreign software companies whose products are most frequently pirated in Nigeria: Microsoft, Adobe, Autodesk, and similar enterprises whose Nigerian piracy volumes are enormous but whose litigation efforts were impeded by the gazette notice requirement.

The 2022 Act removes this requirement entirely. Section 8, which replaces the old section 5 and its successor provisions, makes clear that a work qualifies for Nigerian protection where the author is connected to a treaty partner country, or where the work was first published in such a country, and that a NCC certification of Nigeria’s treaty relationship with the relevant country is conclusive proof of that treaty status.¹⁵ There is no longer any ministerial gazette notice required. Microsoft Corporation, Adobe, or any other foreign software company whose country of incorporation is a Berne or TRIPS member, which encompasses virtually every country with an active software industry, can now bring copyright infringement proceedings in Nigeria on the strength of their treaty-country status alone, without navigating the gazette notice bureaucracy.

This legislative correction is one of the most practically significant changes the 2022 Act makes, and it is entirely absent from virtually all student commentary on the Act. It represents a deliberate closure of the gap that produced the most famous and most criticised line of cases in Nigerian copyright enforcement history.

9. Artificial Intelligence and Copyright: The Open Question

The interaction between artificial intelligence and Nigerian copyright law is an area of genuine legal uncertainty that no student article currently addresses for a Nigerian audience.

The Copyright Act 2022 does not contain any provision specifically addressing works generated by artificial intelligence tools. The Act’s originality requirement under section 2(2), which demands “some effort” to give a work an original character, combined with the authorship framework under section 108, which ties copyright ownership to a human author or a body corporate operating through human agents, means that a work generated by an AI system without any meaningful human creative input faces significant difficulty qualifying for protection under current Nigerian law.¹⁶ The NCC has confirmed this position: AI-generated works without human input are not currently recognised as eligible for copyright protection.

The more nuanced and commercially important question is where the threshold of “human input” sits for purposes of eligibility. A programmer who designs a sophisticated AI system and then uses that system to generate outputs that they select, curate, and modify has expended human creative effort in multiple stages. A content creator who carefully crafts detailed prompts directing an AI image generator, then selects among hundreds of outputs for the one that best realises their creative vision, has made choices that may constitute the kind of creative effort the Act requires. Neither scenario has yet been tested in a Nigerian court, and the question of how much human direction is sufficient to make an AI-assisted work eligible for copyright protection is genuinely open under current Nigerian law.

The absence of any statutory framework governing the use of copyrighted works as training data for AI models is a separate and equally significant gap. Nigerian works, including Nollywood scripts, Afrobeats lyrics, and Nigerian literary texts, have been used in training data for global AI language and generative models, typically without the consent of or payment to the Nigerian rights holders. Whether this constitutes infringement of the reproduction right under section 9 is a live legal question that Nigerian courts have not yet addressed, and one that the NCC and the National Assembly will eventually need to engage with as the AI industry’s use of copyrighted content generates increasing global regulatory attention.

10. The Constitutional Dimension: Section 39 and Digital Access

The digital copyright framework constructed by the Copyright Act 2022 sits at a constitutionally sensitive intersection. On one side, section 44 of the 1999 Constitution protects the copyright owner’s property interest in their digital works, supporting the TPM protection provisions and the notice-and-takedown framework. On the other, section 39 protects the constitutional right to receive and impart information and ideas without interference, which the website-blocking powers and the DRM framework may limit.

The resolution of this tension under the 2022 Act follows the pattern established in the general copyright analysis: the fair dealing exceptions and the specific permitted acts for software users carve out the minimum space needed to preserve meaningful exercise of section 39 rights, while the TPM and blocking provisions protect the rights holder’s legitimate interest in controlling commercial exploitation of their work. Whether the balance struck by the Act is constitutionally adequate has not been tested, and a challenge to the NCC’s website-blocking powers under section 39 of the Constitution would be a significant piece of litigation if it were ever brought.

The data protection dimension also deserves a note, even though it sits at the edge of copyright law: the NCC’s enforcement operations in the digital environment, including the identification of repeat infringers, the monitoring of online content, and the blocking of websites, involve the processing of personal data that engages the Nigeria Data Protection Act 2023. Rights holders, service providers, and the Commission itself must navigate copyright enforcement within the constraints of the data protection framework, adding a layer of regulatory complexity to the digital copyright enforcement picture that the 2022 Act alone does not address.

11. Problem Question Framework

When a problem question involves software, databases, or other digital works, work through the following sequence.

Identify the work’s category. Computer programs are literary works under section 108. Databases are literary works as compilations under section 108. Digital films, music files, and images are governed by the same category rules as their analogue equivalents: audiovisual work, sound recording, or artistic work as the case may be.

Apply the standard literary works analysis for software and databases. Originality requires the code or database structure to be the author’s independent creative work. The idea-expression dichotomy means the copyright covers the code, not the algorithm or the functionality.

For software, consider the permitted acts. Is the defendant a lawful user making an archival backup? Is the defendant observing the program to understand its underlying principles during permitted use? If so, section 20(2) applies and there is no infringement.

For TPM circumvention claims, apply section 50 separately from the underlying infringement. The circumvention of a DRM is itself an offence under section 50 regardless of whether the underlying use of the work constitutes infringement. Conversely, not every use of circumvention tools necessarily leads to infringement of the copyright in the underlying work: a person who circumvents a TPM to exercise a fair dealing right may face section 50 liability even though they would not face section 36 infringement liability.

For rights management information claims, apply section 51 separately. Removal or falsification of rights management information is a separate offence from both TPM circumvention and copyright infringement. All three may arise on the same facts.

For online infringement, apply Part VII. Has the platform received a valid takedown notice? Has it complied? Is the infringer a repeat infringer triggering the account suspension obligation? Is NCC website blocking engaged?

For the Microsoft v. Franike issue, confirm that under the 2022 Act, a foreign software company no longer requires a Ministerial Gazette notice to enforce its copyright in Nigeria. The treaty-country certification from the NCC is sufficient.

12. Common Student Mistakes

Assuming software is not protected by copyright. This assumption, common among students without a technical background, is straightforwardly wrong. Section 108 of the 2022 Act is explicit: computer programs are literary works protected by copyright.

Treating copyright as protecting the functionality of software. The idea-expression dichotomy applies to software as to any literary work. Copyright protects the specific code, not the algorithm, the business logic, or the user-facing features. A competitor who writes their own code from scratch achieves the same functionality without infringing.

Treating database protection as covering individual data points. Copyright in a database covers the creative selection and arrangement of data, not the individual facts or data points themselves. A person who copies the database wholesale infringes; a person who accesses and uses individual data points does not.

Treating TPM circumvention and copyright infringement as the same thing. Section 50 creates a separate offence for circumventing a TPM. This offence exists regardless of whether the underlying use of the work constitutes infringement. A student who conflates the two will misapply both provisions.

Assuming the website-blocking power under section 61 is unconstrained. The NCC’s blocking power, while broad, sits within the constitutional framework established by section 39 of the 1999 Constitution. An answer that treats the NCC as having unlimited censorship authority over online content misses the constitutional proportionality analysis that any blocking order must eventually survive.

Ignoring the Microsoft v. Franike legacy. The removal of the old section 41 gazette requirement is the single most practically significant change the 2022 Act makes for foreign software copyright holders in Nigeria. An answer on the enforcement of software copyright by foreign companies that treats the old Microsoft v. Franike rule as still good law is applying repealed provisions.

13. Quick Reference Table

14. Key Cases

Microsoft Corporation v. Franike Associates Ltd (2011) (CA) remains the most instructive Nigerian decision on software copyright, not for the legal principle it affirmed, but for the procedural obstacle it identified. The Court of Appeal held that Microsoft could not enforce its copyright in Windows without producing a Ministerial Gazette notice, notwithstanding Berne membership. The 2022 Act’s removal of the old section 41 requirement directly addresses this decision and reverses its practical effect for future litigation by foreign software companies.

Navitaire Inc. v. easyJet Airline Co. (2004) EWHC 1725 (Ch) (England and Wales, non-binding) establishes the principle, followed in comparable jurisdictions, that copyright in a computer program does not extend to the business logic or functionality of the program: a competitor who codes the same functionality without copying the underlying code does not infringe. This is the dominant international interpretation of the idea-expression dichotomy as applied to software and is likely to be followed by Nigerian courts when the question arises in a directly Nigerian authority.

Nova Productions Ltd v. Mazooma Games Ltd (2007) EWCA Civ 219 (England and Wales, non-binding) confirms that an idea consisting of a combination of ideas remains just an idea for copyright purposes, even where a large amount of the author’s skill went into formulating that combination, and that this principle applies to ideas embedded in computer programs in exactly the same way as to any other literary work.

Footnotes

¹ Section 108, Copyright Act 2022; Mondaq, ‘Copyright Comparative Guide: Nigeria’ (2025), confirming that computer programs are expressly recognised as literary works under section 108 of the Copyright Act 2022.

² Section 2(2), Copyright Act 2022.

³ Navitaire Inc. v. easyJet Airline Co. (2004) EWHC 1725 (Ch); Nova Productions Ltd v. Mazooma Games Ltd (2007) EWCA Civ 219, confirming that software copyright does not extend to functionality or to ideas, even combinations of ideas.

⁴ Mondaq (n 1), stating that section 108 recognises databases as literary works, specifically identifying “written tables and compilations, including compilations of data stored or embodied in a computer or any medium”; protection applies only to selection or arrangement, not individual data points.

⁵ Section 2(5), Copyright Act 2022.

⁶ Section 20(2), Copyright Act 2022.

⁷ Section 20(2)(a), Copyright Act 2022.

⁸ Section 20(2)(b), Copyright Act 2022.

⁹ Section 50, Copyright Act 2022; S.P.A. Ajibade & Co, ‘A Review of the Nigerian Copyright Act 2022’ (2023), identifying circumvention of technological protection measures as a new provision entirely absent from the old Act.

¹⁰ Section 51, Copyright Act 2022.

¹¹ Section 54, Copyright Act 2022; Noel N. Udeoji, ‘A Cursory Review of the Key Provisions of the 2022 Copyright Act of Nigeria’ (2023) UNIZIK Journal of Public and Private Law, Vol. 13, describing the notice-and-takedown framework under sections 54 and 55.

¹² Section 56, Copyright Act 2022; Udeoji (n 11), noting that section 56 provides for suspension of accounts of repeat infringers.

¹³ Section 61, Copyright Act 2022; Udeoji (n 11), describing the NCC’s power to block infringing websites with a fine of not less than N1,000,000 or imprisonment of not less than 5 years for non-compliance.

¹⁴ S.P.A. Ajibade & Co (n 9), noting that the 2022 Act excludes the old section 41 gazette requirement and that “this change is a positive development since it removes the dichotomy created by the old Act, that served as the basis for some flawed judicial decisions which affected foundational principles regarding international agreements and copyright reciprocity in Nigeria.”

¹⁵ Section 8, Copyright Act 2022.

¹⁶ Mondaq (n 1), confirming that under the Copyright Act 2022, protection is limited to works that are original and created by a human author, and that AI-generated works without human input are not currently recognised as eligible for copyright protection.