7
competition in Nigeria. However, certain other
areas of the law (tort, advertising, comsumer
protection) lightly deal
with it.
Sometimes, a number of intellectual property
rights are used (simultaneously or sequentially)
for protecting creative works.
(c) Fido Dido courtesy of 7up Bottling
Company
2. SCOPE AND DURATION OF
PROTECTION
What categories or types of works
are protected by copyright?
The types of works protected in Nigeria are:
•
Literary works: these include novels,
stories and poetic works; plays, stage
directions, film scenarios and broadcasting
scripts; choreographic works; computer
programmes; text-books, treaties, histories,
biographies, essays and articles; encyclopaedias,
dictionaries, directories and anthologies; letters,
reports, and memoranda; lectures, addresses
and sermons; law reports (excluding decisions
of courts); and written tables or complaints;
•
Musical works or compositions,
including compilations and works composed
for musical accompaniment;
•
Artistic works: these include any
paintings, drawings, etchings, lithographs,
woodcuts, engravings and prints; maps, plans
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and diagrams; works of sculpture; photographs
not comprised in a cinematographic film; works
of architecture in the form of buildings models;
and works of artistic craftsmanship and also
pictorial woven tissues and articles of applied
handicraft and industrial art.
•
Cinematographic
works
includes
motion pictures, television shows, webcasts
and their soundtracks;
•
Sound Recordings including sound
recording of musical works;
•
Broadcasts: sound or television
broadcast by wireless telegraphy or wire or
both or by satellite or cable programmes,
including re-broadcast.
Copyright protects works that are expressed
in print as well as those created or stored in
electronic or digital media. The fact that a
work in its digital form can only be read by a
computer – because it consists only of ones
and zeros – does not affect its copyright
protection.
Music and video CD’s
Protection of Databases
A database is a collection of information that
has been systematically organized for easy
access and analysis. It may be in paper or
electronic form. Copyright law is the primary
means to legally protect databases. However,
not all databases are protected by copyright,
and even those that are may enjoy very limited
protection.
•
In Nigeria, copyright may protect a
database if it is selected, coordinated, or
arranged in such a way that it is sufficiently
original and it fulfills the other basic copyright
requirements. However, exhaustive databases
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What criteria must a work meet to
qualify for protection?
In Nigeria, to qualify for copyright protection,
the following basic requirements must be
met:
1.
Originality: sufficient effort must have
been expended on making the work to give it
an original character. An original work is one
that ‘originates’ in its expression from the
author, that is, the work was independently
created and was not copied from the work of
another or from materials in the public domain.
In any case, originality relates to the form of
expression and not to the underlying idea.
However, it is noteworthy that a work will not
be ineligible for copyright by reason only that
the making of the work or the doing of an act in
relation to the work involved an infringement
of copyright in some other work.
2.
Fixation: the work must be fixed
in any definite medium of expression now
known or later to be developed, from which
and databases in which the data is arranged
according to basic rules (e.g., alphabetically, as in
a phone directory) may not be protected under
copyright law. It may however, be protected
under unfair competition law.
•
In other countries, mostly in Europe,
non-original databases are protected by a
sui generis right called the database right.
This gives a much greater protection to
databases. It allows makers of databases
to sue competitors if they extract and reuse
substantial (quantitatively or qualitatively)
portions of the database, provided there has
been a substantial investment in obtaining,
verifying, or presenting the data contents. In
Nigeria, there is no sui generis system in place
for the protection of non-original database.
When a database is protected by copyright,
this protection extends only to the manner of
selection and presentation of the database and
not to its contents.