Authored By: Joan Dimkpa-Promise Giobari
Rivers State University
1. Introduction
An Abuja based Afrobeats musician prompts ChatGPT to create an upbeat, track fused with Yoruba percussion and themes of cultural relevance. Seconds later the song emerges and it is released. The song goes viral, it receives millions of streams and the artists secures numerous brand deals. However, this poses legal questions regarding ownership and qualification for protection under Nigerian Copyright Law.
Nigeria’s copyright Act [2022]which repealed and replaced the old Copyright Act Cap C28 LFN [2004] widely celebrated as a transformative modernization of the countries’ intellectual property framework. It strengthened protection against piracy, expanded protection for performers, updated provision on digital rights, but remains silent on AI generated and AI assisted content, training data, ownership and liability. It’s provision rests solely on the foundational assumption that creative works are products of the human mind.
This article interrogates the specific gaps in the Copyright Act as it relates to AI generated output, it examines how those gaps create real-world legal uncertainty for Nigerian creators, businesses, institutions and proposes the urgent reforms necessary to bring Nigeria’s IP framework into alignment with technological reality. Section ⅠⅠ examines the mechanics of AI outputs and emergence of the grey zone. Section Ⅲ exposes the gaps in Nigeria’s Copyright Act. Section ⅠV analyzes emerging policies in Nigeria. Section V highlights the perspectives of other jurisdictions. Section VI proposes urgent reforms Nigeria can adopt.
Ⅱ. Mechanics of AI Output and Emergence of the Grey Zone
Generative AI trains on vast Internet data sets often containing Nigerian music tracks, nollywood visuals, literary works and designs. Prompts then produce outputs that may reproduce, adapt or closely resemble protected material. Nigerian users face dual risks; inadvertent infringement and failure to secure protection for their creations. Developers grapple with training data liability while local creators fear uncompensated exploitation. Nigeria’s creative economy, a vital driver of jobs and global soft power hangs in the balance. Outputs may also involve elements of randomness or probabilistic generations and works created through purely mechanical or random processes typically do not satisfy requirements of originality. Some AI generated works may also appear highly creative and in distinguishable from human created works.
III. Critical Gaps in Nigeria’s Copyright Act
The Copyright Act [2022 ]defines an “author” in relation to each category of work. For literary, musical, and artistic works, the author is the person who creates the work, for sound recordings and audiovisual works, it is the producer, for broadcasts, it is the broadcaster. No where does the Act contemplate a non-human entity as a creator, nor does it establish any framework for works in which human creative contribution is minimal or absent Nigerian courts, consistent with common law tradition, have interpreted originality to mean that a work must originate from its author through independent intellectual effort drawing on the English standard articulated in University of London Press v University Tutorial Press([1916]2 Ch.601) and developed through subsequent jurisprudence. A work generated by an AI system following a user prompt arguably satisfies no recognizable standard of human intellectual effort. The AI’s “creativity” is statistical, not intentional. Under current Nigerian law, such a work may simply fall outside the scope of copyright protection entirely.
A. Gap 1: Authorship, Ownership and Originality of AI-Generated Works
Under Section 2(2) Copyright Act [2022] a work is eligible for copyright only if “some effort has been expended to give it an original character” and it is fixed in a perceptible medium. Copyright vests in a “qualified person” a human (Nigerian citizen or resident) or qualifying legal entity as established in Section 28 and Sections 5-8 of the Copyright Act [2022]. AI systems are not legal persons and cannot be authors.
Purely AI-generated content (or outputs with minimal prompting) may fail the “sufficient effort” test and fall into the public domain. Even with prompt engineering and post-editing, no judicial guidance exists on the required level of human creative control. Questions as to who owns AI-assisted works, the user/prompter, the developer, or no one? Some interpretations suggest ownership could vest in the human who “made the arrangements,” drawing analogies from audiovisual works but this remains untested.
B. Gap 2: AI Training on Copyrighted Works
A second and equally urgent gap concerns the legality of training generative AI systems on copyrighted works. Large language models and image generation systems are trained on vast corpora of text,images, music, and other creative content scraped from the internet.Much of this content is copyrighted. The question of whether this training process constitutes reproduction, communication to the public, adaptation, or some combination of restricted acts underNigerian copyright law is entirely unresolved.Section 20 of the Copyright Act [2022 ]on fair dealing, provides for various exceptions and limitations to copyright including research and private study,criticism and review, and news reporting. None of these exceptions was designed with AI training in mind. Whether machine learning qualifies as “research” within the meaning of Section 20 is a question of statutory interpretation with no guidance from the legislature, no judicial authority, and significant consequences for the AI development ecosystem Nigeria is attempting to cultivate.Nigerian creative professionals,musicians, visual artists, authors, filmmakers have legitimate grounds for concern that their copyrighted works are being ingested by AI systems without license,payment, or attribution. The Copyright Act [2022 ]offers them no clear cause of action and no clear remedy. Meanwhile, Nigerian AI developers lack any clear safe harbor confirming that training of publicly available data is legally permissible. Both sides of this equation face untenable uncertainty.
C.Gap 3: Infringement Liability in AI-Assisted Creation
The third gap concerns the allocation of infringement liability when an AI system produces an output that reproduces or substantially resembles an existing copyrighted work without the AI user’s knowledge or intent. If an AI image generator, trained on copyrighted artworks, produces an output that closely replicates a Nigerian artist’s painting, who is liable? The user who entered the prompt? The company any that deployed the AI tool? The developer who trained the underlying model?Nigerian copyright law’s infringement provisions in Sections 36–41 of the Act focuses on acts done by persons copying, issuing copies to the public, performing, communicating. The Act does not contemplate automated infringement, nor does it establish any framework for secondary or contributory liability that would assist courts in attributing responsibility across the AI development and deployment chain.This gap is not merely academic. As Nigerian businesses increasingly integrate AI tools into their creative work grows, they face genuine legal exposure that the Copyright Act 2022 leaves entirely unaddressed.
IV.Emerging Policies In Nigeria
A. The National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy (NIPPS); approved by the Federal Executive Council on 6th November 2025 and launched on 17 December 2025, provides Nigeria’s first unified framework for IP protection and commercialization. It explicitly links IP to digital and data-driven innovation, emphasizing economic value capture from technology-based assets and integration with broader strategies like the Nigeria Startup Act.
B. The National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy; approved in 2025 applies existing IP laws (including the Copyright Act) to AI models and outputs while calling for ethical governance, transparency, and responsible innovation.
C. Legislative Momentum includes; the National Artificial Intelligence Commission (Establishment) Bill, the National Digital Economy and E-Governance Bill (targeted for passage by end of March 2026), and discussions around a Copyright Act (Amendment) Bill 2025.
These steps signal strong policy intent. However, they remain high-level. Specific statutory guidance on AI-generated content such as thresholds for “meaningful human contribution,” tailored exceptions for training, or dataset transparency is still missing. A Copyright Amendment Bill in first reading further indicates recognition of emerging digital gaps.
V Comparative Perspective
A. Italy
A new law entered into force in Italy in October 2025 explicitly clarifying that copyright applies to works of human ingenuity created with the aid of AI tools provided they are the result of the authors intellectual work.
B.The European Union
The EU’s Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market (DSM Directive, 2019) introduced a specific text and data mining (TDM) exception allowing AI training on lawfully accessed content, subject to opt -out rights for rights holders.The European commission in October 2025 published and apply AI strategy which promotes human-centric AI use and supports the uptake of AI in culture and creative sectors. The European Parliament has also emphasized the principle of originality linked to natural persons, pointed out the differences between AI assisted human creations and opposed to purely AI generated creations and called for further analysis of the application of intellectual property rights to content created with the use of AI tools.
C The United States
The United States Copyright office provided policy guidance in 2023 on the registration of works incorporating AI generated material. The office states that copyright may protect human or aspects of the work in cases involving selecting or arranging the AI generated material in a sufficiently creative way. It had a case in 2023 involving a graphic novel called Zarya of the Dawn in which it refused to grant copyright for the AI generated individual images used in the novel but granted copyright for the human-authored and arrangement of the images.
D.Ukraine
The Ukraine Copyright Legislation provides a sui generis right to AI images while traditional copyright still applies to the parts created by humans. According to the legislation, the sui generis right is vested in the author of the computer program or the lawful users of the computer program. This covers all possible technologies including AI.
VI Urgent Reforms for 2026 and Beyond
The reforms required are both legislative and institutional. A piecemeal judicial response relying on courts to extrapolate from existing provisions is inadequate given the pace of technological change and the economic stakes involved. Nigeria needs deliberate,targeted legislative action. The following reforms constitute the minimum necessary framework, Nigeria can adopt.
First, AI Authorship &Ownership; the Act should be amended to introduce a “computer-generated work” provision vesting copyright in the person who undertakes the arrangements for creation, for a reduced term (e.g., 25 years), with clear disclosure requirements.
Second, AI Training Exception; It would be necessary to introduce a statutory text and data mining(TDM) exception permitting AI training on lawfully accessed works, with a robust opt-out mechanism and equitable remuneration for rights holders via CMOs.
Third, Infringement & Liability; The legislature should enact secondary liability provisions establishing when developers, deployers,and users bear responsibility for AI-generated infringement, with safe harbor protections for compliant actors.
Fourth, AI Disclosure; AI developers must be mandated disclosure of AI involvement in works offered for commercial exploitation, enabling informed licensing decisions and protecting human creators’ reputations.
Fifth, CMO Mandate Expansion; COSON, MCSN, and other collective management organizations should be granted rights to collectively negotiate AI training licences and distribute AI-generated royalty pools to members whose works were used in training datasets.
Lastly, NCC Regulatory Guidance; TheNigerian Copyright Commission should publish AI-specific guidelines and interpretive notes, and establish a dedicated AI and IP unit within NCC to handle disputes and provide industry guidance.
VII. Conclusion
Nigeria’s Copyright Act 2022 is, in many respects, a modern and sophisticated statute. Its architects deserve credit for advancing Nigeria’s IP framework beyond the outdated 2004 Act. The grey zone created by the Act’s silence on artificial intelligence is not a minor technical deficiency. It is a structural gap at the intersection of two of the most economically significant forces in contemporary Nigeria; the creative economy and the technology sector. Every day that the gap persists, Nigerian creators lose leverage over their intellectual property, Nigerian AI developers operate in a legal fog, and the country’s potential as a leader in Africa’s digital creative economy is quietly eroded.The reforms proposed in this article are not aspirational they are necessary. The legislative tools, comparative models, and institutional mechanisms required to close the grey zone all exist. What is needed is the political will and legal urgency to deploy them. The Copyright Act 2022 was a bold step forward. The next step is bolder still: building an AI-ready intellectual property framework that serves Nigerian creators, Nigerian innovators, and Nigeria’s creative future before that future is shaped entirely by others.
REFERENCE(S):
Cases
• University of London Press v University Tutorial Press[1916] 2 Ch 601
•U.S. Copyright Office, Zarya of the Dawn Letter (VAu001480196), February 21, 2023.
Legislation
• Copyright Act 2022 (Nigeria)
•Copyright Act Cap C28 LFN 2004 (Nigeria)
•National Intellectual Property Policy and Strategy 2025 (Nigeria)
•Nigeria Start Up Act 2022
•National Artificial Intelligence (AI) Strategy 2025( Nigeria)
•National Artificial Intelligence Commission (Establishment) Bill, National Digital Economy and E-Governance Bill (targeted for passage 2026) (Nigeria)
•Copyright Act (Amendment) Bill 2025(Nigeria)
•Directive (EU) 2019/790 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 17 April 2019 on Copyright and Related Rights in the Digital Single Market [2019] OJ L130/92
•Copyright Act 1976 ( USA)
•Law No.2811-IX on Copyright and Related Rights, 2023(Ukraine)
•Law No.132 of 23 September 2025 (Italy)
Secondary Sources: Journal/Articles
• “Nigeria’s copyright law is not ready for artificial intelligence,” The Cable, January 2026.
• European Parliament Resolution on Copyright and Generative Artificial Intelligence, March 10, 2026.
• WIPO, Artificial Intelligence Infrastructure Interchange (AIII) launch, March 2026; World Intellectual Property Report 2026.
•Andres Guadamuz, ‘Artificial Intelligence and Copyright’ (2017) WIPO Magazine 5
•Enrico Bonadio and Luke McDonagh, ‘Artificial Intelligence as Producer and Consumer of Copyright Works: Evaluating the Consequences of Algorithmic Creativity’ (2020) 2 Intellectual Property Quarterly 112
•James Grimmelmann, ‘There’s No Such Thing as a Computer-Authored Work — And It’s a Good Thing, Too’ (2016) 39 Columbia Journal of Law & the Arts 403
•Mathias Leistner, ‘Big Data and the EU Database Directive 96/9/EC: Current Law and Potential for Reform’ in Sebastian Lohsse, Reiner Schulze and Dirk Staudenmayer (eds), Trading Data in the Digital Economy: Legal Concepts and Tools (Nomos 2017)
•World Intellectual Property Organization, ‘WIPO Conversation on Intellectual Property and Artificial Intelligence’ (WIPO, 2020) WIPO/IP/AI/2/GE/20
•World Intellectual Property Organization, ‘WIPO Development Agenda Recommendations’ (WIPO, 2007)
•United States Copyright Office, ‘Copyright and Artificial Intelligence’ (US Copyright Office, 2023)
