APPRAISAL OF THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK FOR THE ENFORCEMENT OF COPYRIGHT LAWS IN NIGERIA; NIGERIAN COPYRIGHT COMMISSION IN PERSPECTIVE

In the globalization and abandon intellectual innovation, a nation must be able to rip her ideas, inventions, creative works towards technological advancement and global competitiveness. To foster natural talent, Nigeria need to identify her intellectual researchers and inventors, it also need to create a friendly environment and initiate strategies to protect all the intellectual stakeholders and their creative idea or products. Piracy has become a great challenge in the current Information Technology regime to government and the intellectual property. Piracy refers to the unauthorized and illegal reproduction or distribution of materials. protected under intellectual property law. Copyright emphasizes creative work’ that has economic value and is protected through - a plethora of legislative enactments the paper adopted doctrinal method in conducting this research. The paper found that emerging digital environment like the internet and global knowledge economy has not been addressed in the current Nigerian Copyright Act. The execution of the Commission mandate include problems in the justice administration system (slow judicial processes) and dearth of technical tools for anti- piracy operations, inadequate personnel in the Commission, and paucity of funds to execute programmes is another finding of the paper. The paper recommends amongst other that the Nigerian Copyright Act be reviewed to address the challenges of effective protection of creative rights and benefits especially in the emerging digital environment like the internet for global knowledge economy and to incorporate Statutes of minimumstandards under international treaties to which the country issignatory. It is further suggested the Commission should toengage more proactive enforcement of the Copyright Act midreview urgently for more stringent penalties for infringement toensure effective check of piracy in the country.