By Osagie Alonge
The Musical Copyright Society Nigeria (MCSN) has reacted to the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) saying the commission did not have any right to carry out their recent raid and arrest made at their offices.
The MSCN says on Tuesday, September 18, 2012 at about 10AM, seven NCC officials led by a Matthew Ojo in company of about 20 armed police officers burst into the their offices and ransacked the whole offices without any search warrant or a court order.
‘The officials then proceeded to take away files, documents, computer processing units and other materials from MCSN offices without taking any inventory of all the files, documents and materials’, Mayo Ayilaran, DG of the MCSN told NET exclusively
As reported earlier, fives MCSN officials were arrested but the MCSN says the arrested staffers (including two women) were ‘detained in an unknown private detention camp improvised by the NCC’ and that their ‘lawyers were denied access to the staffers’.
‘The act is in violation of a subsisting court order barring NCC from interfering from the operations of MCSN as owner, assignee and exclusive licensee of copyright works in the territory of Nigeria. It will be recalled that MCSN had dragged NCC to court over the violation of its constitutional rights to enforce its copyright without having to apply for a license’, Ayilaran added.
In the judgment, Justice Archibong of the Federal High Court, Lagos on July 25, 2011 before awarding a N40million Naira in damages against NCC and its officers for violating their constitutional rights had noted:
‘The first Respondent (NCC) has failed to acknowledge, appreciate, or welcome the notion and reality that OWNERS and ASSIGNEES of copyright can enforce property rights WITHOUT necessarily being registered as a collecting society by the copyright commission. registration as a collecting society is not a prerequisite for the enjoyment and exercise of rights of an owner or exclusive licensee of copyright’, adding: ‘The provisions of Section 15 of the Copyright Act show clearly that it confers rights on owners, assignees and exclusive licensees be they literary, musical or artistic. I cannot find any part of Section 15 of the whole Act where it is stated that the rights are exclusive preserve of a collecting society.
The September 18 raid at MCSN office is the third of such acts by NCC, which only recognises the Copyright Society of Nigeria (COSON).
