Nigerian Copyright Law

Earlier today I was consulted on a matter that required me to look up the Nigerian Copyright Act. I checked the CLEA (Collection of Laws for Electronic Access) on the WIPO website which is usually pretty good. It listed all the relevant laws alright but the full text was not available in electronic format. A Google search revealed “Nigeria Law”, a resource as good as many on LII network.

Not only did that site contain the Nigerian Copyright Act 1990, which supplied the answer that I needed for my advice, but also the Patents and Designs Act 1990 and many other statutes of that enormous and increasingly important country. Two particularly good sections of the website caught my eye. The Nigerian Internet Law Reports, a collection of transcripts of the Supreme Court, and an FAQ which offered some useful advice about some of the too good to be true propositions that occasionally beat our spam filters.

In view of the debate on my Oracle post a few days ago I was interested to see whether there was any equivalent to art 52 (2) (c) EPC and was interested to see that there wasn’t. It would appear that there is no obstacle to patents for software implemented inventions, but I would be interested to find out from Nigerian readers whether that is actually the case.

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