[Guest post] Nigeria's copyright licensing system comes under parliamentary scrutiny

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[Guest post] Nigeria's copyright licensing system comes under parliamentary scrutiny

 Söğüt Atilla-Aydın Thursday, July 30, 2026 - CMOs, copyright, nigeria, Seun Lari-Williams

The IPKat has received and is pleased to host the following contribution by Katfriend Seun Lari-Williams (University of Antwerp) on the recent investigation launched by the Nigerian House of Representatives to assess the alleged irregularities in copyright administration. Here’s what Seun writes:

Nigeria's copyright licensing system comes under parliamentary scrutiny

by Seun Lari-Williams

Who watches the watchmen? This question, ancient as it is, acquired a copyright flavour in Nigeria on 10 June 2026, when Nigeria's House of Representatives adopted a motion directing the House Committee on Justice to investigate what the motion describes as a "predatory scheme weaponized against the Nigerian music industry to siphon funds from copyright owners". 

Ready for investigation?

A decade-old rivalry finds a new venue?

The motion arises from a dispute with a long paper trail. This blog has followed the friction between Nigeria's two rival music collective management organizations (CMOs) for close to a decade, from the 2017 to 2018 board crisis at Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON) and the Nigerian Copyright Commission’s (NCC's) contested regulatory interventions [see IPKat here], through litigation over Musical Copyright Society Nigeria’s (MCSN) legal standing [see IPKat here], to the administrative position that appeared settled by 2022 [see IPKat here]. COSON's licence had not been renewed since 2019, leaving MCSN as the sole approved CMO for musical works and sound recordings in Nigeria. COSON had already asked the Federal High Court in 2017 to void the NCC's approval of MCSN and the Attorney-General of the Federation's (AGF) directive behind it. Justice Buba dismissed that lawsuit in February 2018, holding that MCSN had been validly authorised and the AGF had acted lawfully. The current complaint is not a re-run of that suit, but it revives the same underlying grievance against the same rival. Throughout this decade of dispute, it has been rights holders who have borne the costs: COSON's suspension left its members without a lawful royalty collection mechanism, while the uncertainty created by competing societies gave broadcasters a ready excuse to avoid paying royalties altogether.

Old rivalry, new complaint

The parliamentary probe asks a broader (and vaguer) question than either of the earlier disputes: whether there have been "alleged irregularities" in copyright administration. What has prompted it, on COSON's account, is a more specific complaint of a disputed allocation of levy funds to MCSN, which is distinct from the licensing question already settled in court. At the time of writing, the text of the motion is not publicly available. However, the account given by the National Assembly’s own information hub, credits a campaign of press briefings by COSON and other stakeholders as the motion’s trigger.

According to those press briefings, the dispute began in 2017 when the then AGF directed the NCC to approve MCSN as a licensed collective management organisation. COSON alleges that MCSN had not satisfied the documentation, fee, and evaluation requirements prescribed by the Copyright (Collective Management Organisations) Regulations 2007. COSON further alleges that the AGF’s office secured the withdrawal of seven pending criminal cases against MCSN and its long-serving chief executive without a formal nolle prosequi. Although the Federal High Court subsequently upheld the legality of the AGF's direction approving MCSN, COSON maintains that other aspects of the events surrounding MCSN's licensing and the withdrawal of the criminal proceedings warrant investigation.

COSON's own licence was suspended the following year. The immediate flashpoint, however, concerns a ₦1.2 billion allocation under Nigeria's Private Copy Levy Scheme, which COSON alleges the NCC directed to MCSN under circumstances that the House Committee has now been asked to examine. The same disbursement has been separately challenged by the Record Label Proprietors Initiative (ReLPI) through litigation in the Federal High Court, on different grounds. None of these allegations has been tested or accepted by the Committee, and no findings have yet been published.

Who regulates the regulator?

The levy allocation allegation has a regulatory dimension worth noting. The Copyright (CMO) Regulations 2007 were designed to keep the NCC's role in levy distribution confined to oversight of the approved CMO rather than direction of allocation between competing ones. If the NCC directed the ₦1.2 billion to MCSN at the AGF's instruction, it was not exercising that supervisory function but substituting its own distribution decision for the CMO's, an action that has been argued to sit outside the competence that section 39(7) of the Copyright Act 2004 (now repealed and replaced by the Copyright Act 2022) confers on the Commission.

Where copyright regulation ends?

If substantiated, the allegations illustrate a category of institutional failure that receives comparatively little attention in collective management scholarship. Governance frameworks at both international and national levels, from WIPO's Good Practice Toolkit for CMOs to the EU's Collective Rights Management Directive and the UK's equivalent licensing body regulations, are principally designed to regulate CMOs, not alleged misconduct by the public authorities who are responsible for licensing and supervising them. Questions of regulatory misconduct are instead generally left to public law mechanisms such as judicial review, legislative oversight, constitutional accountability, and anti-corruption law. This issue, therefore, highlights the point at which sector-specific copyright regulation gives way to administrative law.

In any event, the House Committee on Justice was given four weeks to report. Notwithstanding this, at the time of writing, no findings have been made public. Whatever the Committee ultimately concludes, the Nigerian dispute is worth watching beyond its immediate facts. If the allegations are substantiated, the case for revisiting how the Copyright Act 2022 delineates the NCC's role relative to executive direction will become difficult to ignore. If they are not, the probe will nonetheless have demonstrated that parliamentary intervention is currently the only available escalation point when CMO governance disputes exceed the reach of sector-specific regulation. Either way, it is a reminder that collective management frameworks are only as robust as the institutional environment in which they operate.




Image credit: Gemini

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