Piracy: Dismantling the Robin Hood myth

Hi there, Meet Kunle Okeke, a third year student, majoring in geology. Kunle loves music and wishes to be a renowned afro pop artiste. “To write well, you need to read smart books, to release good music, you must listen to good music as well”, Kunle mentor informs him. Hence, Kunle often pays computer village a visit to buy and download as much music as possible for as low as 100 naira to 500 naira when he could rather sit at home and stream quality music on Apple music student discount for a full month.

Kunle is smart, shouldn’t we all be like kunle?

Many students have become true-hearted customers to ‘professional’ pirates accompanied with mini laptops on small tables sheltered by an umbrella in ikeja and other parts of Nigeria. These bootleggers have succeeded in impoverishing the creative economy leaving crumbs to the content creators.

Recently, I was privileged to attend two summits organized by the US Mission in Nigeria for stakeholders in the Book publishing and Entertainment Sector on Anti-piracy. It was truly an experience, interestingly, it pioneered a gathering of both distributors and producers where both parties aired their challenges and thought through for solutions.

During the Entertainment session, an artiste expressed an issue, where he borrowed finances to promote his upcoming album. Prior to its release date, the album was already sold at Alaba market which pummeled debt. This was also the plague of a creative writer during an earlier session, where she found her book on the roadside sold by hawkers. This here a well-known predicament for a lot of musicians who are left to hustle for other means of finances. I.e. shows. 

One fascinating point here is the mindset built around these pirates, besides the obvious profit-making reason, they believe they play the Robin Hood role, aiding poor music lovers like kunle  and sadly these mentality is warmly embraced by people specifically the youths. These brings me to a factor which was also spoken of in the summit. Awareness.  A lot of Nigerians are unaware of the fact that piracy is unlawful, punishable and immoral. Rather, it is viewed as a smart shortcut to make ends meet.

Fascinatingly, this notion is deeply rooted in the Nigerian family life. For instance, a primary school recommended English novel “Pepeye and the orange tree” could be sold at 1000 naira at the book shop in school, lot of families may consider this expensive and rather buy from outside. Now the question truly is, where is outside?

*Asides* definitely not talking about Burna’s album,

Outside could be another bookshop with a cheaper price, or a shop with pirated copies, or a road side hawker. How many parents care enough to find out if the book sold is the original copy? A lot of times once the item is sold at cheaper rates, they care less about the originality and instead buy pirated books for their children to save cost.

These parents forget their children are seated in the car, watching them price down a writer’s intellectual property. Then these same kids go over to secondary schools and are advised by their teachers to photocopy original textbooks so as to “save cost”, not too far from there they end up in university where they buy handouts from lecturers.

If an individual isn’t aware of piracy then plagiarism would be accepted with open arms.  I once asked a friend in one of the federal universities if he had heard of an application called “Turnitin” and he said what is that? How then do you submit assignments I thought to myself? lot of students download other students work online and change a few things and submit to their lecturers. This is such an offence and a lot of them are unaware.  

Winston Churchill once said: “we shape our building thereafter they shape us”, one’s family and environment makes or breaks a man, Awareness is really important especially at the grass root level to inculcate in children habits that protect their intellectual property and also to understand its value.

 Thankfully, a lot of primary and secondary schools have introduced civic education into it’s academic curriculum but having piracy has a topic embedded in it won’t also be a bad idea. Respect for intellectual property must override cost saving notion no matter how we sugarcoat with rationalism.

 Awareness is key and the way forward.