As part of its ongoing fight against intellectual property theft, which continues to undermine the creative industry and the national economy, the Nigerian Copyright Commission (NCC) has destroyed pirated books valued at N141.5 million.
The exercise, which involved shredding the seized materials to prevent them from re-entering circulation, was supervised by NCC Oyo State Coordinator, Oluropo Oke, on behalf of NCC Director-General, John Asein.
The destruction took place on Tuesday in Ibadan, the capital of Oyo State. The pirated books, seized over the past three years from bookshops and markets in Abeokuta, Sango-Otta (Ogun State), and Ibadan, were shredded using an environmentally friendly machine to ensure they cannot be recirculated.
“We valued the books before destroying them and found their total value to be N141,550,000. During the operations, we discovered that some booksellers could not prove the source of their purchases. There are several features that differentiate original books from pirated copies, including the binding, colour, grammage and point of purchase. We need to establish whether the books were bought from the original owners or publishers, or acquired on the streets,” he said.
The director-general warned that the Nigerian Copyright Act empowers the commission to punish any citizen caught pirating or illegally dealing in intellectual property adding that book piracy continued to harm national economic growth and deprived authors and publishers of the benefits of their work.
According to him, those in possession of the seized books faced penalties ranging from fines and forfeiture to other punishments under the law.
“We are making every effort to prevent pirated books from returning to the market.We are using a shredding machine because it is environmentally friendly. We believe that shredding will ensure the books do not re-enter circulation and understand this is a significant loss to booksellers, but instead of buying from pirates, we encourage them to purchase from the original sources, publishers or their representatives, rather than from the streets,” he said.
The Executive Secretary of the Nigerian Publishers Association (NPA), Rotimi Iyiola, said that book piracy had eroded much of publishers’ livelihoods.
“Witnessing the destruction of the seized pirated books by the NCC is a welcome development. Economically, book piracy causes enormous damage, not only to authors and publishers but also to workers and their families, and it deprives the government of revenue. Our jobs as publishers have been stolen, and our means of livelihood eroded,” Iyiola said.
He lauded the NCC for its commitment and dedication to eradicating book piracy in Nigeria and reiterated that the NPA was ready to cooperate with the commission to ensure that piracy was effectively addressed.
