In this report, SAMUEL ABULUDE looks at the ongoing war against piracy of creative works referred to as copyright infringement, and how to tackle it at all ends.
In the entertainment industry today where film makers do not make a turn-over of the money invested into their project and musicians or record labels don’t have fate in having returns from the physical sales of CDs because of the scourge of piracy, many have lost faith in the ability of government agency, the Nigeria copyright council to reduce the problem of theft to its barest minimum.
The market of pirated products, both local and foreign Cds, DVDs, books is still thriving in the country despite the existing laws that punish those who produce and market them. The award winning movie, ‘30 Days In Atlanta’ produced by comedian Ayo Makun AY was pirated while it was still in the cinemas as the VCDs was seen in major cities in the country being hawked by vendors. Sadly, same went for Kunle Afolayan’s movie ‘October 1st’ as this made film makers to adjust their budget in making big-budget movies because of the fear of the unknown.
Many have hinged the problem of piracy to lack of a proper distribution network. But now that cinema is coming back with about more than few dozen cinemas scattered around major cities of the country and this has helped film makers to channel their effort to making movies for the cinemas and recouping funds from their screenings before going to the DVD market. Chief Executive Officer of FilmHouse Cinemas, a network of cinemas, Kene Mparu noted that the technology was in place to tackle copyright infringements from the cinema end, he said in an interview last year, “What you find is that most of the films that are pirated are not from the cinemas. In some cases, especially for Nigerian films, when we release them, they’re watermarked specifically for each cinema chain. That way, if it gets pirated, you can begin to trace where it happened. This is one of the things we’ve put in place to try and mitigate that. We also use DCP encryption; if you give us your film on a hard-drive and we encrypt it, no other cinema or media player will be able to access it. The drive will only work on the projector of the cinema it was encrypted for, which makes it useless to any other person – pirate or not. We’ve put this in place at our cost to try and mitigate piracy. A lot however still needs to be done by the Nigerian Copyrights Commission, Nigerian Film and Video Censors Board, and the industry in general to fight this menace because I think the pirates are known. It’s the muscle to fight them that is in question. It’s really unfortunate that 30 Days in Atlanta has been pirated. It breaks our heart deeply, and we want to strongly disabuse any notion that the piracy might have emanated from the viewing at cinemas because we have a proven track record of security as far as modern cinema is concerned in Nigeria.”
The NCC and its challenge of tackling piracy
The Nigeria Copyright Council NCC is the government agency in charge of tackling piracy and in past years, many stakeholders in the industry has frowned at their inability to tackle the menace to the barest minimum. On the part of the agency, they are playing their role well within the resources at their disposal. Barrister Obi Ezeilo, the newly appointed Lagos zonal manager of the NCC speaking on modalities to tackle the menace said, “The commission does all it can to fight piracy. We are playing our part. Recently we got other security agents to collaborate with us on making arrest on pirates. We had been using the police to arrest but because of the enormous work on their shoulders, they cannot be on our beck and call. Three days ago, I met with chiefs of the Nigeria Security and Civil Defence Corps NSCDC on collaborating with us. We get calls on the spur of the moment and we have to be there at the spot to arrest the defaulters but if we don’t have the personnel and we are not allowed to carry fire arms, we lose the defaulters as they escape. Our operations are more robust. The NSCDC will help us now to be prompt and arrest defaulters. This, the police force have been doing and they will still do, but now they are over laboured, hence our collaboration with the NSCDC.”
Barrister Ezeilo also urged the right owners to have confidence in the agency as they are geared to serve them. He noted that funding had been a problem for years now as the NCC Bill Cosby has filed a breach of contract lawsuit against Andrea Constand, her mother, her attorneys and the National Enquirer, saying they “have all broken aconfidentiality agreement negotiated in 2006, according to a partially unsealed complaint filed in U.S. District Court,
Cosby is asking for Constand to return the money she got in the settlement.
The sealed complaint was originally filed on Feb. 1 but U.S. District Judge Eduardo Robreno ordered a redacted version be released earlier this week.
The suit alleges Constand, 42, and her mother Gianna broke the confidentiality agreement when they spoke to the Montgomery County distric