The Director General of Musical Copyright Society of Nigeria (MCSN), Mr. Mayo Ayilaran, in this exclusive interview with Charles Okogene in his Ikeja office, said that the Nigeria copyright law as it is today, does not protect the rights of those laying claims to the ownership of proposal.
According to the copyright administrator whose society is one of the societies at the fore-front of enforcing the rights of copyright owners, “proposal is a mere idea” that cannot be enforced at the law court except the owner takes the following steps of registering it at the appropriate agencies.
What is your take on those complaining that govt officials are hijacking their proposals?
In the first place, my own take is that proposals are mere ideas and ideas are not protected by the law of copyright. Copyright does not protect ideas, it protects expressed work; ideas that can be reproduced and seen by others. Is the proposal in a textual material that can be sold by others to the public? If you want to make a soap for instance, you write down the processes in a multiple of book or pamphlet and you put your name and entitled it, if you want to make a soap, this is the step to follow, that becomes a literally work with the name of the author that can be protected by copyright because that can be taken to Nigerian Copyright Commission, NCC, to be registered as a work, which has a title. Anybody who then goes to take that material and gives it another title, by so and so, the person has infringed the copyright of the first person or even putting the first man’s name as, a kind of piracy because the first scenario I painted is plagerism, has equally infringed on the original author’s rights because he has no permission to do so. That is one aspect of the issue they are complaining of and which does not hold water.
The second aspect is that if it is a special proposal to a particular organisation to execute, like bidding, you can bid, I bid and the man in charge can pick the one he likes depending on the cost and so on; and in order to safeguard the proposal if you believe that it is a special proposal that is not in existence, and you do not want any other person to steal from it, copy or replicate it, then immediately you are ready with it, you go to patent office and say this is an idea I have put in place for doing this particular Programme if it is a programme like Nigerian Idols or whatever; patent office will look at it to know if it is original and patent it in your name. If you take it to a TV office and they look at it and say no, this cannot fly and they throw it away and two weeks thereafter you see the same programme coming up, all you need to do is to sue them for infringing on your patent right which is outside the purview of NCC and equally outside the purview of the minister for justice who is supervising NCC. It is more under the ministry of trade and patent office ; so it is the patent office that will come out and say ‘truly we have this particular process or programme patented by us in the name of xyz. It is only then that people who are complaining that their proposals are stolen can sue. They need to take above steps, and mark you, this is also different from trademark . Trademark is that the way of doing such programme has been established by way of patent so it can be trademarked as something people can watch or buy. The Nigerian idols for instance, that we are seeing, is trademarked, it is registered and nobody can come up again and say he wants to do Nigerian Idols. That is why I say I have reservations about those complaining that their proposals have been hijacked. That is my opinion and I believe that is the position of the law. That is why I said they may not succeed if they go to court because the objection they will first get is that ‘ my lord, this is not a copyright matter. It is merely an idea that anybody can write and so on and so forth.
So your position now is that if I bring a proposal to MCSN and you looked at it and say it cannot work and later I saw you implement it, what you are saying is that I have no claims to it?
Yes; unless you proved that it is your proposal as you have outlined it and that is how MCSN is using it. And If you can prove it, we will tell you that it is not your idea because you have not patented it anywhere. That it is free for all and that anybody can come up with the idea.
To be continued
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