Akeem Aponmade, a legal practitioner and intellectual property consultant and expert in IP law enforcement. He is very passionate about intellectual property rights and an avid anti-piracy campaigner as well. An intellectual property consultant of note, he is the lead consultant at A.O Aponmade & Co. Aponmade has worked in IP firms. He is a member of the National Anti-piracy Committee and an adviser to the Nigerian Copyright Commission. He spoke to funmi ilesanmi on ways individuals can best protect their intellectual property rights, software piracy and level of awareness on intellectual property rights in Nigeria.

IP in Nigeria
The knowledge that Nigerians have about the concept of intellectual property is minimal. The ramifications of IP rights and the impact of IP infringement are quite low.

From my experience over the years some people are now aware but the awareness level is still quite low. Several years ago, I witnessed where a pool of right owners went to the police station to request for police support in raiding a shop where several thousands of pirated works were found.

On getting there, the DPO picked up a fake copy and requested for the original and said are you sure this is a fake copy, why are you bothering this people we should praise them for a job well done; this is the way Taiwan started.

I think the police have improved over the years; you need to explain to them what has been done.

We have improved in terms of knowledge but there is still a long way to go. A long way to go among the law enforcement officers themselves, we need to take the issue of IP infringement more seriously. 

We are not talking about just the right owners but everybody.

There are people who have died as a result of being driven in vehicles where fake brake pads were used.

There are people who have died because fake drugs were administered on them. Somebody who has hypertension and fake drugs to cure the ailment was administered on him, he cannot be better.

The celebration of IP Day needs to be driven by both the private and public sector. Unfortunately, we have not seen the federal government showing seriousness in IP rights by putting IP on the front burner.

How to Protect your Intellectual Property Right
The starting point is the rule of law.

You have the Copyright Act and all the subsidiary litigations in place and that law vests rights in the creators and owners of certain works.

This means that they would enjoy copyright of their work for a number of years, and that if such work is infringed upon, the owner can take up the matter by suing the infringer and demand for damages for an account and then ask for conversion.

If a pirated copy is made of a work; that (pirated) copy is deemed to be your property when the court at the end of the day finds that an infringement of your work has been made.

You also have the right to write to the law enforcement agencies asking them to apprehend the infringer and prosecute him.

The Copyright Act provides for both civil remedies and criminal sanctions; so if you want to protect your work, first of all you must know that the law allows you to protect your work because if the law does not make copyright infringement a civil wrong and does not make the act an offence then there is nothing you can do about it.

That the law provides for it is a big boost to right owners interested in enforcing their rights.

The other thing to talk about now is what steps to take to physically protect your work from being infringed and it depends on the type of work you are talking about.

 I know that in the literary industry which is the book industry, some people have come up with copy protects – materials used in printing that make it impossible for anyone to copy the contents.

 There is also the DFID, a material placed in a book to prevent it from being pirated.
There are different kinds of antipiracy devices people have come up with in different areas.

 You have the literary industry comprising publishers, software developers, photographers. You also have those in the music and film industries.

You have those in the broadcast and those in the physical arts – sculptors and the rest of them so there are different types of works and different types of owners.

In the United States of America for instance, those in the motion-picture industry have come up with a device that makes it impossible for you to replicate from an original DVD. That is a way of protecting your work.

What you must realize is that as science and technology are improving so are also the means of infringing on the copyright of people.

What copyright owners must also do is that if the thief does not stop thinking of devising new ways of stealing my property, I also must not stop thinking of how to protect my work.

Preventing people from infringing on your intellectual property right is the first step towards protecting your work.

The second step is what happens when the work has been infringed? If you sit down in your office or home and you are doing nothing, it means that the infringement would go serial.

What right owners also need to do is to put in place a kind of system that would help them detect when their works have been infringed and to identify where the infringement took place and who is responsible for the infringement.

 I am also aware that in US and Europe, there are those we call ‘investigative consultants’ and law firms; and associations also have their employees – (Association of right owners) that have the responsibility of going out to monitor the pirates.

To find out if there are infringed copies and where they are coming from.

When they get the information, they pass it to their association and if they want to use law enforcement agencies they do that.

 If what they want to do is to file an action in court, they pass the information to their solicitors who then file the necessary processes in court.

Software Piracy
There are different ways in which software piracy can take place.

 When you take genuine software and make several copies from it that is one way to pirate software.

Another way is when a company that has 100 systems buys one software product – you must know first of all that what was sold is the licence – that is the authorization to use the software.

The authorization is given in units so if you buy software, the manufacturer of the software would indicate how many systems you could use it on.

 It can be indicated that the software can be used on three systems.

The moment you load it on the third system, you do not have any right to load it on the fourth system.

 If you load it on the fourth system, you have stolen that software.

 Because it has been copied on more than the specified number of systems, there has been an infringement.

 The Server dictates the number of systems a company has and the question to ask anyone who does it is: where is your Certificate of Authorization (COA) in all the systems? Failure to produce the COA shows that whatever thing you have there is illegal.

These are ways in which you can know if the software has been pirated.

What you must realize is that IP law enforcement in Nigeria is just developing.

When it comes to physical CD containing software, it can be just a straight way piracy.

When you pick one of those, you will know if it has been pirated or not.

 You do not need to go to Dublin before you know because the packaging and every other thing would be different but there are some that are of such high quality that it would be very difficult to tell if it has been pirated or not.

The packaging and every other thing could be the same. It is only the manufacturer that would know all the distinguishing factors.

What Government Needs to Do
The agencies responsible for enforcing the IP laws need to be more serious about enforcement. I do not see any reason the police should not have an IPR section at the first CID level, at the state CID level, at the area command level and at the division level.

The issue of IP is a growing problem. Presently, there is a product which has no genuine one in the country. Effort must be made to remove the one we have in the country completely.

 Today Nigeria is a destination for all the major brands of the world because they see it as one that holds great potential for growth.

The markets in Europe and America are saturated; this is why a country with more than 150 million people is the one that should not be ignored by any serious minded brand owner.

If we are interested in jump starting our economy, one of the areas that we have to take seriously is IP and attention can only be paid to the country when we take enforcement of IP rights seriously.

Government can show seriousness if it funds such agencies sufficiently.

 When it insists on such agencies functioning effectively because it is not just a matter of funding alone, how are you dispensing it? So if you are given more, what will you do?

One of the ways of doing this is to ensure that the right people run these agencies.

When you put a round peg in a round hole, you get the desired results.

Is there anybody in the presidency that is overseeing IP right enforcement in the country or do we expect the president to know what is going on everywhere?

BSA Report on Software Piracy in Nigeria
This is a software alliance made up of software vendors like Microsoft, Symantec, and Autodesk along with their hardware partners like Dell and the rest.

What they do is to join hands to create an environment where IP rights can thrive in order to assist in achieving the overall goal of the software companies.

 I had the priviledge of being their spokesperson sometime back.

Every year, the hardware manufacturers have a figure of how many products they sell in each country.

If you buy a new HP system or Dell for instance, you are most likely to find operating system in them, the software already loaded. It is different from going to Otigba to couple the system.

You do not have the right to couple the software.

Dell has an arrangement with Microsoft that for every hardware sold, there is Microsoft software in it and Dell pays Microsoft for this.

The application software whether you want to use Microsoft office or Adobe or Autodesk, it is then that you will buy and install on your hardware.

When they sell general software like Microsoft office, the intention might be that you have 1,000 systems and that 800 of them will use Microsoft office which is the application, not the operating system.

But the number of hardware sold into the country when compared with the application software sold by software companies does not match.
 
That is one area the BSA gets it statistics from. This is used to determine the level of software piracy we have in the country.

They are also aware that there is a growing menace of purchase of software online.

When people buy software online not from the vendor but from people who advertise that they have cheap software to sell, they end up buying pirated ones.

 I know that some people who sell counterfeit software buy on auction and then get those things shipped to them.

Anybody in a particular business knows the price at which their product is being sold coming directly from the vendor so if anybody is offering you a pirated product at lesser price, then the red flag should be raised that something is fishy

Cost should not be a reason for patronizing pirated software. If we place value on IP rights, people will not think that way.