Moral Rights in Nigerian Copyright Law: Attribution, Integrity and the 2022 Act Changes

A spoken-word poet performs a piece at a Lagos open-mic night, records it on a phone, and posts it online. Within a week the video has been re-shared hundreds of times. By the second week, a motivational account with half a million followers has posted the entire poem as a screenshot with no credit. A different account has taken the first verse and appended it to a self-help message that subtly distorts the poet’s original meaning. A third account has posted it under a different person’s name altogether. None of these accounts paid the poet anything. But more than the financial loss, the poet wants her authorship recognised, her words left intact, and her name removed from a false attribution she did not authorise.

These are precisely the situations that moral rights are designed to address, and they are situations that the Economic Rights of Copyright Owners in Nigeria framework cannot fix on its own. Economic rights protect the commercial exploitation of a work. Moral rights protect something different: the personal and reputational connection between an author and the work they created. Understanding moral rights as a category legally distinct from economic rights, governed by different rules on transmissibility, duration, and waiver, is one of the more technically precise requirements of Nigerian copyright law.

1. What Moral Rights Are and Why They Exist

Moral rights originate in the Continental European copyright tradition and are grounded theoretically in the personality theory of intellectual property, most associated with Hegel: that a creative work is an expression of the creator’s personality and will, and therefore deserves protection as an extension of the creator’s self rather than merely as a property asset.¹ This theoretical foundation explains why moral rights behave so differently from economic rights. Economic rights are property; they can be sold, licensed, inherited, and traded. Moral rights, at least during the author’s lifetime, are personal; they attach to the author rather than the work, and they cannot be separated from the author by any commercial transaction, however total an economic rights assignment may be.

The practical consequence for the creative industries is significant. A musician who signs a record deal transferring all copyright in their compositions to a label retains, regardless of what any contract says about the matter, the right to be credited as the composer of those songs and the right to object to modifications that harm their reputation. A novelist who sells the film rights to their book for a substantial sum retains the right to have their name on the film adaptation and the right to object if the adaptation distorts their work in a way that is prejudicial to their honour. These rights cannot be bargained away during the author’s lifetime, even if the author signs a contract purporting to do so.

2. The Three Moral Rights Under Section 14

Section 14 of the Copyright Act 2022 confers three distinct moral rights on the author of any work in which copyright subsists.²

The right of attribution, sometimes called the paternity right in comparative copyright discourse, gives the author the right to claim authorship of the work and in particular to have their authorship indicated in connection with the acts of reproduction, performance, broadcasting, and other uses of the work referred to in sections 9, 10, and 11 of the Act.³ There is one express exception: when a work is incidentally or accidentally included in a broadcast reporting current events, the right of attribution does not require the broadcaster to interrupt the report to credit the author. This is a sensible and proportionate carve-out; a news camera that accidentally captures a piece of street art in the background of a shot is not in breach of the right of attribution by failing to credit the visual artist mid-broadcast.

The right of integrity gives the author the right to object and to seek relief in connection with any distortion, mutilation, or other modification of, or any other derogatory action in relation to, the work, where such action would be or is prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation.⁴ This right is not a veto over all changes to a work. The threshold is derogatory treatment in the specific sense that the Act requires: the action must be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation. A minor edit that does not harm the author’s standing does not engage the right of integrity. A modification that misrepresents the author’s views, that attaches the author’s name to offensive content, or that so alters the work as to damage how the author is perceived in their professional field is the kind of action the right is designed to address.

The right to object to false attribution is a new addition introduced by the 2022 Act.⁵ The repealed 2004 Act contained no equivalent provision. This right protects a person from having a work falsely attributed to them as its author, a situation that can arise in two quite different ways: a genuine author may wish to object to a work being attributed to someone else, and a person who is not the author may wish to object to a work being wrongly attributed to them. The second scenario, less intuitive but equally important, arises where someone’s name or reputation is attached to work they did not create, potentially harming their standing if the work is of poor quality, offensive, or inconsistent with their known views.

3. The Most Important Change in the 2022 Act: From Perpetual to Duration-Limited

This is the point where the 2022 Act most decisively breaks from its predecessor, and it is the point most likely to be the subject of an examination question specifically targeting the current law.

The repealed Copyright Act Cap C28 LFN 2004, in its section 12(1), expressly described moral rights as “perpetual, inalienable and imprescriptible.”⁶ Perpetual meant that they outlasted the copyright itself, surviving indefinitely even after the economic rights had expired and the work had passed into the public domain. Inalienable meant that they could not be transferred under any circumstances. Imprescriptible meant that no limitation period could extinguish them.

The Copyright Act 2022 changes all three of these characteristics simultaneously, and in each case in a direction that makes moral rights more commercially manageable while reducing their pure protectionist strength.

Section 14(3) provides that the rights of attribution and integrity shall not be transmissible during the life of the author, meaning they remain personal to the author throughout their lifetime, consistent with the old Act’s inalienability position.⁷ But section 14(3)(b) then provides that upon the death of the author, these moral rights become transmissible by testamentary disposition or by operation of law.⁸ The author’s estate or their designated beneficiaries can therefore inherit and enforce moral rights, can choose to enforce them or to let them lapse, and can potentially agree with commercial parties on how the deceased author’s moral rights will be exercised.

Section 14(4) provides that the moral rights conferred by section 14 shall subsist for the same duration as the copyright in the work, after which they expire.⁹ This is a decisive departure from the old Act. Once the copyright in a work expires and the work enters the public domain, the moral rights in that work also expire. Anyone can then reproduce, adapt, or modify a public domain work without needing to credit the original author or seek relief from distortion. This is a coherent policy choice: copyright law is built on the premise that protection serves a purpose, and that once the protection period has ended, the public should have genuinely free access to the work in all its dimensions.

The judicial and transitional implication of this change is worth examining carefully, and it is an area where certainty is difficult because it has not yet been litigated under the 2022 Act. Works that were protected under the old Act when moral rights were perpetual are now governed, following the 2022 Act’s commencement in March 2023, by the new duration-limited framework. The practical impact of this shift on the estates of deceased Nigerian authors, visual artists, and composers, who may have planned on perpetual moral rights protection, is a genuine area of legal uncertainty that the transitional provisions of the Act do not fully resolve.

4. Transmissibility: What Changes on the Author’s Death

The 2022 Act’s position on moral rights during the author’s lifetime, that they are non-transmissible and remain personal to the author, is straightforward. The position on what happens after the author’s death is more nuanced and has implications that student resources typically skip over.

Because moral rights are now transmissible on death by testamentary disposition or operation of law, an author can, in their will, specify who shall have the right to enforce their moral rights, including the right of attribution and the right of integrity, after they are gone. This allows an author to designate a specific person or organisation, perhaps a cultural foundation, a literary estate, or a trusted family member, to act as custodian of their moral rights for the remaining duration of the copyright. Where no specific testamentary disposition is made, moral rights pass by operation of law according to the general rules of succession applicable to the estate.

This is a meaningful change for the estates of prominent Nigerian authors, composers, and visual artists. The literary estate of a deceased Afrobeats composer can now actively enforce the attribution right if recording labels begin misattributing the composer’s work, or the integrity right if a posthumous remix distorts the original in a way the estate considers prejudicial to the composer’s reputation, for as long as the copyright endures.

5. Performer’s Moral Rights: A Separate Regime

Section 66 of the Act establishes a parallel, somewhat different moral rights regime for performers, as distinct from the moral rights of authors under section 14.¹⁰ A performer has the right to be recognised as the performer whenever their performance or its fixation is used, and the right to object to and prevent the use of their performance or its fixation if such use would be prejudicial to their reputation.

The key difference between performer’s moral rights and author’s moral rights under section 14 is a notable one: the Act describes performer’s moral rights as inalienable during the performer’s lifetime, using language that echoes the old Act’s position for author’s moral rights more closely than the new section 14 framework does.¹¹ This creates an asymmetry worth understanding. An author’s moral rights, under the 2022 Act, will expire with the copyright. A performer’s moral rights, under section 66, appear to be treated as genuinely inalienable in a stronger sense, at least for the performer’s lifetime, though the Act does not spell out what happens on the performer’s death with the same clarity that section 14(3) does for authors. The duration of performers’ rights is fifty years from the end of the year in which the performance was first fixed, after which the performer’s related right and presumably the associated moral rights expire.¹²

6. Waiver: Commercial Flexibility Within the Framework

The Act’s protection of moral rights does not mean they are entirely inflexible in commercial settings. The Act recognises circumstances in which an author may waive or choose not to enforce their moral rights, and in practice the Nigerian music and film industries have developed a range of standard contractual approaches to managing moral rights in transactions.¹³

A film composer who licenses a score to a studio may consent, in a carefully worded agreement, to the studio modifying the score for purposes of fitting the film’s edited runtime, on the understanding that this modification does not amount to derogatory treatment within the meaning of section 14(1)(b). A featured artist who records a verse for another musician’s album may agree to be credited simply as a featured artist rather than as a co-composer, effectively limiting their attribution right contractually in exchange for the collaboration opportunity. A brand partnership deal may include a provision under which an artist consents to the advertiser making minor modifications to their work for specific, identified commercial uses.

What these examples share is specificity: a waiver of moral rights should identify the particular uses covered, the nature of the modifications permitted, and the context in which the waiver operates. A broad, general, blanket waiver of all moral rights in all circumstances is a different matter. Courts in comparable jurisdictions have expressed scepticism about the enforceability of blanket waivers, on the basis that where a waiver is so comprehensive as to eliminate the moral right entirely, it comes close to a full assignment of a right that the statute has designated as inalienable during the author’s lifetime. Nigerian courts have not yet addressed this question directly, but it is an analytical fault line that practitioners and students should be aware of.

The commercial pressure on this question is real and specific to the Nigerian context. Young Afrobeats artists and Nollywood writers, many of them young, commercially inexperienced, and eager for their first break, frequently sign contracts presented by established labels, studios, and agencies that contain broad moral rights waivers as boilerplate provisions, sometimes without appreciating what is being surrendered. The Act’s formal recognition that moral rights cannot be fully extinguished during the author’s lifetime provides some protection against the worst commercial overreach, but it does not remove the practical disadvantage of an unequal bargaining position.

7. The Constitutional Dimension: Integrity Rights vs Freedom of Expression

The right of integrity sits in genuine, unresolved tension with section 39 of the 1999 Constitution, which guarantees freedom of expression including the freedom to receive and impart ideas.¹⁴ This tension crystallises in the context of parody, satire, transformation, and critical commentary on existing works, all of which are forms of protected expression under section 39 and all of which involve, to varying degrees, the modification or distortion of an existing work.

A satirist who rewrites the lyrics of a popular Afrobeats track to mock a politician is modifying the work in a way that the original artist might find derogatory or reputation-damaging. A filmmaker who creates a critical documentary incorporating, and reframing in a negative light, clips from a Nollywood director’s work is subjecting that work to something that could be characterised as derogatory treatment. Yet both the satirist and the documentary filmmaker are, simultaneously, exercising freedoms of expression and creative commentary that section 39 of the Constitution protects.

The fair dealing exceptions in the Copyright Act 2022, discussed in Fair Dealing in Nigerian Copyright Law: What Changed Under the 2022 Act, address this tension at the level of economic rights by carving out space for criticism, commentary, and parody from the copyright owner’s exclusive economic rights. Whether an equivalent carve-out exists within the moral rights framework is less clear. Section 14(1) is expressed in terms that appear absolute within the scope of what it covers, and the Act does not explicitly state that a fair-dealing defence available against an economic rights claim is equally available as a defence to a moral rights claim. The phrase “subject to Part II of this Act” at the opening of section 14(1) suggests that the exceptions in Part II apply to moral rights as well, but the Act’s drafting on this point is not as precise as it could be, and it remains an area where Nigerian courts will need to make interpretive choices that have not yet been made.

8. The Ghostwriting Problem

One of the most commercially significant moral rights questions that Nigerian copyright law will eventually need to answer is the treatment of ghostwriting in the Afrobeats industry. Ghostwriting, where a composer or lyricist writes songs that are then performed and released by another artist as their own, without the writer being credited, is widely practised in Nigerian popular music, as in the global music industry generally. The commercial logic is clear: artists build their brand partly on the creative identity associated with their music, and ghost-writing arrangements allow writers to earn fees while artists maintain their brand. The legal complication is this: if the actual composer of a song has not been credited, and an Afrobeats star takes sole credit for a track they did not write, is the actual composer entitled to exercise the right of attribution to claim their authorship publicly, even where the ghostwriting arrangement contemplated that they would not?

This question runs directly into the waiver discussion above. If the ghostwriting arrangement included, expressly or by implication, a waiver of the composer’s right of attribution, the answer may be that the waiver, though unenforceable in a general sense, is enforceable for this specific identified use, the commercial release of the specific track under the credited artist’s name. If no such waiver was included, or if the waiver is treated as unenforceable as an attempt to extinguish an inalienable right entirely, the uncredited composer may have a live moral rights claim. Nigerian courts have not yet squarely addressed this fact pattern, and it is likely to arise as the Afrobeats industry’s commercial scale and its associated legal disputes grow.

9. Problem Question Framework

When a problem question engages moral rights, work through it in this order.

Identify which of the three rights is engaged. Is the complaint about a failure to credit the author, pointing to the right of attribution under section 14(1)(a)? Is it about a modification to the work, pointing to the right of integrity under section 14(1)(b)? Or is it about a false ascription of authorship to someone who did not create the work, pointing to the false attribution right under section 14(2)?

For the right of integrity, check whether the treatment is “derogatory” in the statutory sense. The modification or action must be prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation. Not every change or use the author dislikes meets this standard. Identify specifically what harm to honour or reputation the treatment causes or would cause.

Check whether the right has been waived. Has the author signed an agreement that expressly or impliedly consents to the act complained of? If so, assess whether the waiver is specific enough to be given effect, or whether it amounts to an impermissible attempt to extinguish an inalienable right entirely.

Check whether the author is alive or deceased. If the author has died, check whether moral rights have been transmitted by testamentary disposition to a specific person, or whether they pass by operation of law. If they have passed by testamentary disposition, that beneficiary has standing to bring the moral rights claim.

Check the duration. Has the copyright in the work expired? If so, the moral rights have also expired under section 14(4) of the 2022 Act, and there is no live moral rights claim regardless of what the old Act may have said about perpetual moral rights.

10. Common Student Mistakes

Stating that moral rights are perpetual under Nigerian law. This was the position under the repealed 2004 Act. Under the 2022 Act, moral rights subsist only for the duration of copyright and expire when copyright expires. Citing the old Act on this point is a material error.

Stating that moral rights are completely inalienable. During the author’s lifetime, moral rights cannot be transmitted. But on the author’s death they become transmissible by testamentary disposition or by operation of law. They are inalienable in the sense that they cannot be assigned by commercial transaction during the author’s lifetime, not in the sense that they can never pass to anyone else.

Confusing moral rights with economic rights. A claimant who wants to prevent all commercial use of their work without payment is asserting economic rights, not moral rights. A claimant who wants to be credited as the author, or to prevent a distortion that damages their reputation, is asserting moral rights. These claims arise under different provisions, have different legal requirements, and are subject to different defences.

Treating the right of integrity as a veto over all modifications. The right of integrity is engaged only where the modification is prejudicial to the author’s honour or reputation. An editing change that improves a work, or a contextual re-use that does not harm the author’s standing, does not engage the right of integrity even if the author would prefer that no changes were made.

Ignoring the false attribution right as new law. The right to object to false attribution was not in the old Act and first appears in the Copyright Act 2022. Any examination answer that discusses moral rights without mentioning this new addition is incomplete as a statement of current Nigerian copyright law.

Failing to apply the performer’s moral rights as a separate regime. Section 66 governs performer’s moral rights; section 14 governs author’s moral rights. The two operate under different rules, particularly on the question of inalienability, and should not be merged into a single undifferentiated discussion.

11. Quick Reference Table

12. Key Cases

Multichoice (Nig) Ltd v. MCSN Ltd/Gte (2020) 13 NWLR (Pt. 1742) 415 recognised, in the context of musical works used in broadcasting without authorisation, that a musical composition or performance represents the artist’s unique creative vision and emotional expression, a principle consistent with the personality theory underlying moral rights protection. While the case was primarily decided on economic rights grounds, the court’s language about the personal significance of creative works to their authors informs how Nigerian courts are likely to approach moral rights claims in the music and entertainment context.

Comparative guidance: Pasterfield v. Denham and Another (1999) FSR 168 (England and Wales) illustrates the kind of analysis relevant to the right of integrity. The court in that case held that for treatment to be derogatory, it must be shown that the modification is prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author, and that this requires more than showing that the author is personally unhappy with the change. A similar standard is likely to guide Nigerian courts when the right of integrity under section 14(1)(b) is directly in issue for the first time in a reported decision.

Comparative guidance: Confetti Records v. Warner Music UK Ltd (2003) EWHC 1274 (Ch) (England and Wales) addressed the integrity right in the context of a rap adaptation of a musical composition. The court found that the claimant had not established that the adaptation was prejudicial to their honour or reputation within the legal standard required, illustrating that the threshold for derogatory treatment is not easily met and requires evidence of specific reputational harm, not merely the author’s personal objection to the modification. Nigerian courts are likely to look to this reasoning when first addressing integrity right claims directly.

Footnotes

¹ Adejoke Oyewumi, Nigerian Law of Intellectual Property (University of Lagos Press, 2015) 5, discussing the personality theory and its influence on moral rights doctrine.

² Section 14, Copyright Act 2022.

³ Section 14(1)(a), Copyright Act 2022.

⁴ Section 14(1)(b), Copyright Act 2022.

⁵ Section 14(2), Copyright Act 2022; Mondaq, ‘A Review of the Copyright Act of 2022’ (2024), noting that the right to object to false attribution is a new addition not found in the repealed Act.

⁶ Section 12(1), Copyright Act, Cap C28, Laws of the Federation of Nigeria 2004 (repealed).

⁷ Section 14(3)(a), Copyright Act 2022.

⁸ Section 14(3)(b), Copyright Act 2022.

⁹ Section 14(4), Copyright Act 2022.

¹⁰ Section 66, Copyright Act 2022.

¹¹ TNP, ‘Moral Rights in Nigerian Copyright Law: Protecting Musicians’ Intellectual Property: An Analysis of the Copyright Act, 2022 and Its Implications for Music Creators’ (May 2026), discussing performer’s moral rights as inalienable during the performer’s lifetime under section 66.

¹² Section 56(1)(b) or equivalent duration provision for performers’ rights, Copyright Act 2022.

¹³ TNP (n 11), giving examples of moral rights waivers in Nigerian music industry commercial practice.

¹⁴ Section 39(1), Constitution of the Federal Republic of Nigeria 1999.