By: Oluwafisayo Fatoyinbo
Edited by: Tosin Shonibare


Day after day, the value placed on intellectual property like movies, books, music and software wanes. This is due to the abundance of piracy and a huge lack of regard to the factor of copyright on intellectual property.
According to Wikipedia, “Copyright is a legal right, existing in many countries, which grants the creator of an original work exclusive rights to determine whether, and under what conditions, this original work may be used by others”. Copyright is denoted with the logo © which means that any book, music, movie, audio, software or any other intellectual property of any kind which has this logo written/inscribed on them has a copyright.

Essentially, such works as described above should not be gotten for free or be taken without the owner's express grant. Sadly, too many disregard the obvious sign of copyright and go on to acquire intellectual property of other people without paying a dime. This is called an infringement of intellectual property, Wikipedia explained it well: “Copyright infringement (colloquially referred to as piracy) is the use of works protected by copyright law without permission, infringing certain exclusive rights granted to the copyright holder, such as the right to reproduce, distribute, display or perform the protected work, or to make derivative works”.

A survey carried out in Nigeria in 2016 revealed that people who infringed on copyright of intellectual property ended up making more money than the original owners. Not only in this African country, the evil is perpetuated in every part of the world. People download songs they did not pay for, all thanks to some sites that stole the song to make it free for other people. People go to bookshops and in pretence of looking at the book, they scan the book and leave without buying it.
Copyrighting has failed to prevent this evil as its scope of hunting down perpetuators is not wide enough to accommodate the various forms it is being done. Too many people are far away in the comfort of their rooms stealing media files off the internet; while the copyright laws may tame the owners of the website, it may never reach that person and other people who took it. Uncaught and undeterred, they continue the distribution in their abode.

Copyright infringement is a crime on all fronts: morally and legally. While there are very few laws bothering on infringement in many countries, the outright wrong being done is morally forbidden. It is unfair to go on the web to steal the product of many people's sweat, hard earned money, efforts and ideas. It is unconscientious to perpetuate such acts of deliberately avoiding payment for something that should be paid for.

The effect of copyright infringement on the owners of intellectual property is massive and it is advised that people should deter from such evil. Producing an average ntellectual property costs a fortune, producing a good one costs even more. Movies, for example are stolen off the internet every now and then. While some owners feel the impact a little, some feel it greatly. I'm sure if more people stole Kevin Hart's Jumanji 2 that cost him about 90,000,000 US Dollars to produce, he would feel the effect drastically. Many people in the industry are suffering from depression today because of how things turned out despite it being copyrighted.

Gone are the times when copyrighting a work secured it from any types of theft, nowadays, in the face of rapid technological advancement, copyrighting has lost its grip on security of properties. Copyrighting intellectual property to protect it from theft has become a myth overnight.
It must be emphasized that copyright infringement did not start today. As with many bad things, it is an old habit that dies hard. Many kids grew up infringing on the efforts of other people; copying assignments in school, cheating in exam halls by looking at the next person's work without asking them, fleshing up an idea another person shared and claiming it like it's theirs, peeping through a window to see a movie in another person's house and so on.. These little habits accumulated to form the crime of copyright infringement and such acts should be curbed.
Sadly, with the internet showing the way to the bad act and the law's inadequate provisions, copyright infringement might take too long a time to die.
However, while the battle against it continues, the public should be educated more about the effects of their actions on the owners. Also, owners of intellectual property should tighten their grip on security such that stealing their dear property will be almost impossible.
Finally, the public should be taught to identify a copyrighted property and be advised to dissuade from infringing on them.
Hopefully, one day soon, the evil of copyright infringement will be tamed.