Works Eligible for Copyright in Nigeria Under the Copyright Act 2022

A university student in Ibadan films a comedy skit on her phone, writes the jingle that plays over it herself, and posts it online. A software developer in Yaba builds a budgeting app and writes every line of its code from scratch. An Afrobeats producer lays a new beat under a sample of a forgotten highlife record from the 1970s. All three have created something. The question this article answers is which of these creations actually qualifies for copyright protection under Nigerian law, and what conditions each one must satisfy before the law will recognise it as a protected work at all.

This is the foundational doctrinal question of copyright law. Before you can ask who owns a work, what rights flow from it, or whether someone has infringed it, you must first establish that the work is eligible for copyright in the first place. Get this step wrong in an examination and every subsequent step in your answer collapses with it.

1. The Six Categories of Eligible Works

Section 2(1) of the Copyright Act 2022 lists six categories of work eligible for copyright: literary works, musical works, artistic works, audiovisual works, sound recordings, and broadcasts.¹ Every copyright dispute in Nigeria begins by placing the work in question into one, or sometimes more than one, of these six boxes.

Literary works cover the written and spoken word in its many forms: novels, poems, plays, textbooks, law reports, lecture notes, and, significantly, computer programs, which the Act expressly classifies as literary works.² This classification matters more than it might first appear. A student building a mobile application for a final-year project is, in the eyes of Nigerian copyright law, writing a literary work in exactly the same legal sense as a novelist writing a manuscript.

Musical works cover musical compositions, whether or not they are accompanied by words, and regardless of the genre, complexity, or commercial viability of the piece. An Afrobeats hook lasting fifteen seconds is, in principle, as eligible for copyright as a full symphonic score, provided the eligibility conditions discussed below are met.

Artistic works cover paintings, drawings, sculptures, photographs, engravings, works of architecture, and works of artistic craftsmanship.³ Adire cloth designs, Nsibidi-inspired graphic art, and contemporary Nigerian gallery work all fall within this category, provided they are original. There is an important carve-out here, discussed in section 6 below, for artistic works intended to function as industrial designs.

Audiovisual works are works that combine a series of related visual images, with or without accompanying sound, capable of being shown as a moving picture by mechanical, electronic, or other means, and include the soundtrack.⁴ This is one of the more significant terminology changes introduced by the 2022 Act. The repealed 2004 Act used the older term “cinematograph film.” The Copyright Act 2022 deliberately broadens this to “audiovisual works,” a term that comfortably covers not only Nollywood feature films but also YouTube content, Instagram Reels, TikTok videos, and any other moving image content with a recorded soundtrack, formats that did not meaningfully exist when the older legislation was drafted.

Sound recordings are audio fixations of sounds, other than those forming part of an audiovisual work, capable of being reproduced or communicated audibly.⁵ A recorded Afrobeats track, separate from any music video built around it, falls into this category. Note that the sound recording is legally distinct from the underlying musical composition it captures: the producer’s right in the recording and the songwriter’s right in the composition are two different copyrights that can be owned by two entirely different people.

Broadcasts cover radio and television transmissions made by wireless means, satellite, cable, or wire, whether the content broadcast is live or pre-recorded.⁶ A live radio commentary of a football match and a pre-recorded television drama series are both broadcasts for this purpose, and the broadcasting organisation that transmits them holds a related right distinct from any copyright that may exist in the underlying content being broadcast.

2. The General Conditions for Eligibility: Effort and Fixation

Falling within one of the six categories is necessary but not sufficient. Section 2(2) of the Act imposes two further conditions on literary, musical, and artistic works before they become eligible for copyright: first, that some effort has been expended in making the work to give it an original character, and second, that the work has been fixed in a medium of expression, known now or developed later, from which it can be perceived, reproduced, or otherwise communicated, whether directly or with the aid of a machine or device.⁷

The originality requirement: from “sufficient effort” to “some effort.” This is one of the most important and most commonly misunderstood changes the 2022 Act introduced. The repealed 2004 Act required “sufficient effort” to give a work an original character, a standard that gave courts real discretion to deny protection to works regarded as too simple, too short, or too derivative of existing forms. The Copyright Act 2022 lowers this threshold to “some effort.”⁸ The practical effect is significant: a minimalist poem, a short digital illustration, a fifteen-second comedic skit, or a simple remix arrangement can now satisfy the originality requirement far more easily than under the old law, because the question is no longer whether the effort was sufficient in degree, but merely whether any creative effort was expended at all.

What “originality” means in this context has been settled by Nigerian case law for decades, and the 2022 Act does not disturb the underlying principle. In the leading case of Plateau Publishing Co. Ltd v. Adophy, the Supreme Court held that originality for copyright purposes does not mean that the work must be a product of original or inventive thought.⁹ It means only that the work must not be a verbatim reproduction of a prior work. Originality lies in the form of expression, not in the novelty of the underlying idea. This is the Nigerian articulation of the idea-expression dichotomy that runs through copyright law generally: two screenwriters can each independently write a film about police corruption in Lagos without either infringing the other’s copyright, because the idea of police corruption belongs to no one, but the specific words, scenes, and dialogue each writer uses to express that idea belong to them individually.

The fixation requirement. A work must be fixed in some medium from which it can be perceived or reproduced, whether by direct sensory perception or with the assistance of a machine.¹⁰ This is why an unrecorded, improvised performance, a freestyle rap delivered live with no recording device running, attracts no copyright in the performance as a literary or musical work, however original its content. The moment that same freestyle is captured on a phone recording, fixation occurs and copyright in the underlying lyrics and melody springs into existence automatically, without any further formality.

Quality and purpose are irrelevant. Section 2(3) of the Act confirms that a work meeting the effort and fixation conditions is eligible for copyright regardless of its quality or the purpose for which it was created.¹¹ A poorly written, three-line jingle composed purely for a soft drink advertisement is, in the strict legal sense, exactly as eligible for copyright as an acclaimed literary novel. Courts do not sit as critics assessing artistic merit; they sit as adjudicators determining whether the statutory conditions have been satisfied.

3. Compilations and Pre-Existing Material

Section 2(5) of the Act addresses an issue that arises constantly in practice: what happens when someone compiles, arranges, or curates pre-existing material, such as a database, an anthology, or a playlist? The Act confirms that copyright in a compilation does not confer any exclusive right in the pre-existing material or data comprised within it.¹² The compiler’s copyright protects the selection, arrangement, and organisation of the material, the creative judgment exercised in putting the compilation together, but it does not give the compiler any new claim over the underlying content itself. A law student who compiles an anthology of unreported Nigerian case summaries acquires copyright in the structure and selection of the anthology, not in the underlying judicial pronouncements, which remain in the public domain regardless of the compilation.

4. Works Built on Infringing Material

A provision that receives almost no attention in existing commentary, but that carries significant practical weight, is section 2(4): a work is not rendered ineligible for copyright merely because the making of the work, or some act done in relation to it, involved an infringement of copyright in some other work.¹³ Put plainly, an unauthorised remix of an existing Afrobeats track, made without the original producer’s licence, can itself attract a fresh copyright in the new creative material the remixer has added, even though the act of making the remix may simultaneously expose the remixer to liability for infringing the copyright in the original recording.

This is a genuinely important distinction for students to hold onto, and one that virtually no SERP-level article on Nigerian copyright explains clearly: eligibility for copyright and liability for infringement are two separate legal questions, decided under two separate parts of the Act, and a negative answer to the second does not automatically produce a negative answer to the first. A sampling producer can simultaneously be a fresh copyright owner in their remix and a copyright infringer in respect of the underlying sample, and both characterisations operate at the same time without contradiction.

5. The Industrial Design Carve-Out

Section 2(6) of the Act provides that an artistic work is not eligible for copyright if, at the time the work is made, the author intends it to be used as an industrial design as defined under the Patents and Designs Act.¹⁴ This carve-out exists to prevent overlapping protection between copyright and the registered industrial design regime, which has different registration requirements, different duration, and a different governing statute. A fashion designer who creates an original print pattern purely as a piece of textile art retains copyright in it as an artistic work. The same designer who creates that same pattern with the specific intention of applying it to mass-produced garments may find the pattern more properly falls to be protected, if at all, under the Patents and Designs Act’s industrial design provisions rather than under copyright. [See: Patentable Inventions in Nigeria: What the Patents and Designs Act Protects for the registration regime that governs this category.]

6. Folklore: A Genuine Step Toward Protecting Traditional Knowledge

One of the more significant innovations of the Copyright Act 2022, and one almost entirely absent from generalist commentary aimed at students, is its treatment of folklore. The Act extends specific protection to expressions of folklore, traditional cultural expressions belonging to Nigerian communities, including oral traditions, performances, and forms of artistic expression rooted in indigenous heritage. Commercial exploitation of folklore outside its traditional or customary context requires the consent of the relevant community and, in practice, engagement with the Nigerian Copyright Commission, and unauthorised commercial exploitation can attract criminal sanction.

This provision is directly responsive to the constitutional concern discussed in What is Intellectual Property Law in Nigeria?: traditional knowledge belonging to Nigerian communities has historically fallen outside the protective scope of an individual-authorship-based copyright framework. A masquerade performance tradition specific to a particular community, an oral praise-singing style, or a textile pattern with deep cultural roots does not fit comfortably into the model of a single identifiable author who can be the registered “owner” of a work. The folklore provisions represent a legislative acknowledgment that collective cultural creations deserve protection too, even though the precise mechanics of enforcement, including exactly who has standing to act on behalf of a community and how consent is properly obtained, remain less developed than the rest of the Act’s framework.

7. The Constitutional Dimension: Originality and Section 39

The idea-expression dichotomy established in Plateau Publishing Co. Ltd v. Adophy is not merely a doctrinal technicality. It is the central mechanism by which Nigerian copyright law reconciles itself with section 39 of the 1999 Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression, including the right to receive and impart ideas and information.¹⁵ If copyright protected ideas themselves rather than their particular expression, the first person to write about a given theme, whether police corruption, romantic betrayal, or political satire, could effectively monopolise that entire subject matter and exclude everyone else from writing about it at all. By confining copyright protection strictly to the specific form of expression and leaving the underlying idea free for anyone to use, Nigerian copyright doctrine preserves the constitutional space for multiple authors to engage independently and competingly with the same subject matter. This is precisely why two Nollywood scriptwriters can both produce films exploring the theme of Lagos street hustling without either infringing the other, so long as neither has copied the other’s specific scenes, dialogue, or sequence of events.

The “some effort” threshold introduced by the 2022 Act raises a related, genuinely open question that has not yet been tested by Nigerian courts. Because the Act commenced only in March 2023, there is at the time of writing no body of decided case law applying the new “some effort” standard, and the Act itself supplies no further definition of the phrase. Where exactly the floor sits, whether a single-sentence social media caption, a four-bar drum pattern, or a momentary photographic composition clears the bar, is a matter that will eventually be resolved through litigation, and is a legitimate area of academic speculation and critical analysis for students rather than settled doctrine. Any examination answer that engages with this uncertainty honestly, rather than asserting a confident bright-line rule the Act does not actually provide, demonstrates a stronger grasp of the current state of Nigerian copyright law than one that does not.

8. Problem Question Framework

When a problem question asks you to determine whether a particular creation is eligible for copyright, work through the following sequence.

Step one: identify the category. Place the work into one of the six statutory categories under section 2(1): literary, musical, artistic, audiovisual, sound recording, or broadcast. Some facts will engage more than one category simultaneously, for example a music video, which involves both the underlying musical composition and the audiovisual work built around it, each analysed separately.

Step two: apply the effort and fixation test. For literary, musical, and artistic works, ask whether some effort was expended to give the work an original character, applying the Plateau Publishing principle that originality lies in expression rather than idea, and ask whether the work has been fixed in a perceivable, reproducible medium.

Step three: check for any disqualifying factor. Has the work been created with the intention of functioning as an industrial design, which would remove it from copyright and direct it instead toward the Patents and Designs Act? Is the work a compilation, in which case copyright protects only the selection and arrangement, not the underlying pre-existing material?

Step four: remember that quality and purpose do not matter. Resist the instinct to disqualify a work in your answer because it seems too simple, too commercial, or too unoriginal in the everyday sense of that word. The statutory test is effort and fixation, not artistic merit.

Step five: separate eligibility from infringement. If the facts suggest the work was built using material taken from an earlier copyrighted work, do not conclude that this automatically defeats eligibility. Apply section 2(4): the new work may still be eligible for its own copyright even while the act of creating it exposes the creator to a separate infringement claim.

9. Common Student Mistakes

Treating “originality” as requiring novelty or inventiveness. This is the single most frequent error in Nigerian copyright examination answers. Plateau Publishing Co. Ltd v. Adophy is unambiguous: originality concerns the form of expression, not the novelty of the underlying idea or thought. A work can be entirely unoriginal in its subject matter and still satisfy the originality requirement, provided the author has independently expressed that subject matter in their own words, images, or sounds.

Citing the “sufficient effort” standard from the repealed 2004 Act. The Copyright Act 2022 deliberately lowered this threshold to “some effort.” An answer that still refers to “sufficient effort” is citing repealed law and will lose marks for currency, even if the surrounding analysis is otherwise sound.

Assuming registration is required for copyright to exist. Copyright in Nigeria arises automatically once the effort and fixation conditions are satisfied. The Nigerian Copyright Commission’s Register of Works, established under the 2022 Act, exists to provide an evidentiary presumption in litigation, not to create the underlying right itself.

Confusing the sound recording with the underlying musical work. Students frequently treat a recorded song as a single undifferentiated copyright. In fact, the composer’s copyright in the musical composition and the producer’s copyright in the sound recording are two separate rights, often owned by two different parties, and a problem question can easily test whether you can keep them analytically distinct.

Concluding that an infringing derivative work cannot itself attract copyright. As section 2(4) makes clear, this is incorrect. Eligibility for copyright and liability for infringing someone else’s copyright are separate legal questions that can both be answered in the affirmative at the same time.

10. Quick Reference Table

11. Key Cases

Plateau Publishing Co. Ltd v. Adophy (1986) 4 NWLR (Pt. 34) 205 remains the leading Nigerian authority on the meaning of originality in copyright law. The Supreme Court, per Karibi-Whyte JSC, held that originality does not require the work to be a product of original or inventive thinking. It requires only that the work not be a verbatim reproduction of an earlier work, and that originality lies in the particular form of expression the author has given to the underlying idea, not in the novelty of the idea itself. This principle continues to govern the originality analysis under the Copyright Act 2022, notwithstanding the change in statutory wording from “sufficient effort” to “some effort.”

Married Media Ltd v. Lawrence Akpa is cited alongside Plateau Publishing as part of the established line of Nigerian authority on the eligibility criteria for copyright protection, confirming the consistent judicial approach to originality and fixation that predates and continues to inform the application of the current Act.

Footnotes

¹ Section 2(1), Copyright Act 2022.

² Section 108, Copyright Act 2022.

³ Section 2(1)(c), Copyright Act 2022.

⁴ Definition of “audiovisual work,” Interpretation section, Copyright Act 2022.

⁵ Definition of “sound recording,” Interpretation section, Copyright Act 2022.

⁶ Definition of “broadcast,” Interpretation section, Copyright Act 2022.

⁷ Section 2(2), Copyright Act 2022.

⁸ S.P.A. Ajibade & Co, ‘A Review of the Nigerian Copyright Act 2022’ (2023), discussing the shift from “sufficient effort” under the repealed 2004 Act to “some effort” under the 2022 Act.

⁹ Plateau Publishing Co. Ltd v. Adophy (1986) 4 NWLR (Pt. 34) 205, per Karibi-Whyte JSC.

¹⁰ Section 2(2)(b), Copyright Act 2022.

¹¹ Section 2(3), Copyright Act 2022.

¹² Section 2(5), Copyright Act 2022.

¹³ Section 2(4), Copyright Act 2022.

¹⁴ Section 2(6), Copyright Act 2022; Patents and Designs Act Cap P2 LFN 2004.

¹⁵ Section 39(1), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.