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This study examined the Role of Film in National Development: Problems and prospects using movie industries and movie viewers in Abuja as a case study. Survey research methodology was adopted while one hundred copies of the questionnaire were administered to the selected respondents within Movie Industries and movie viewers in Abuja metropolis. Findings have established that Nigeria film industries are promoting our cultural values, it builds youths talents. Also, poor funding of movie industries, inadequate production equipment, poor scripting, poor story research and the advent of ICT have been described as the major problems facing movie industries in Nigeria in achieving national development. Nigeria home movie industries can enhance national development through stories that focus on peaceful co-existence of Nigeria, if their stories are on corruption effects, if stories are on good governance and if the stories are in culture. It is recommended that the Nigerian Films Censors Commission should scrutinize films before they are sent out for viewing by the larger audience and script writers should always have at the back of their minds that Nigeria cultural heritage and national unity should be foremost on their minds when they are writing any script. This chapter also recommends the creation of more film festivals in order to encourage both amateurs and professionals in this field in order to showcase their productions; connect and network for partnership should be established. Funding initiatives to encourage both emerging and emerged veterans in this field is recommended so that more revenue can be generated for the nation and the productions from Nollywood can stand shoulder high with her counterparts from the rest of the world.

This work focuses on the challenges orchestrated by piracy in the Nigerian movie industry, taking into cognizance the mode of operation of the pirates, impacts on the movie industry, and while also exploring the advantages embedded in the adoption of technological measures and political restructuring in terms of devolution of governmental powers in combating piracy so as to build a stalwart indigenous movie industry geared towards international best practices and standards.

The study aims to buttress the fact that cultural and theatrical performances contribute to a sustainable economic development for Nigeria. The study adopts descriptive and observatory method in its methodology to examine the performances and festivals to ascertain how they impact positively on the economy. It is revealed that through the performances such as drama, dance, music, chants, songs, recitals, festival performances- masquerades and regattas create avenue for revenue generation that adds to the economy. Additionally, the sales made from the Nollywood video film productions both locally and internationally are major sources of income and foreign exchange for Nigeria. It is recommended that the government should invest in the cultural sector to enable the practitioners acquire the necessary equipment to enhance their productions in order to make more contributions to the improvement of the economy.

This paper buttresses the fact that effective management of human and material resources can make a positive impact to increase revenue generation for the cultural industry and contribute to national development. A combination of sociological, library research approaches and interviews conducted with economic as well as art managers were adopted for data collection. From the study, it is observed that cultural exchange and tourism can be used to attract tourists that will bring foreign exchange to add to the revenue generation for the economy. This can be achieved by having a fixed date for our festivals, carnivals, and traditional performances in dance-music such as Mkpokiti, Igbakwu, Atunyereogwu, Nwaumuagbogho, Nwanwaite, Egwu Iza and Igbo Cultural War Dance. Masquerades performances including that of Ijele Akwunechenyi, Atu, Ugo, Izaga, Inyinya, and Adamma are to be utilized to achieve this goal. It is also noted that the Nollywood films should be harnessed as well as funded to ensure quality productions to attract local and international patrons to the industry and increase revenue generation. Additionally, the utilization of human resources to put the economy at prosperity and growth can be achieved through the employment of qualified professionals to manage key sectors of the cultural industry for prudent accountability and development. It is also recommended that effective leadership capable of managing the economy and the people be employed to provide good governance.

This article explores the intersectionality between enhanced national copyright laws and economic growth of African creative industries. Recently, African creative industries, which include films, fashion, traditional cultural expressions, music, and literary arts, resurged into various national economic productive space. This article critically examines and analyzes the connecting thread between African creativity and economic growth. I use Nigeria as a case study to critically analyze how a strong National copyright regime may impel an indigenous creative industry, for example, ‘Afrollywood (a collection of indigenous African audiovisual film genre productions), and Nollywood, the Nigerian film industry, the third largest globally in terms of production index. Hollywood is the leading film industry while Bollywood and Nollywood occupy the second and third position respectively. Most developing economies in Africa, including Nigeria suffer from legal lag in their intellectual property (IP) right regimes. The consequences of playing ‘catch-up’ in IP policies and rights enforcement stalls the developing of a robust regional and international trade system and creative industrial base. Therefore, Africa interacts in a monetized creative field that is uneven. This article concludes that a starting approach to spur African creative industrial economic engine and artistic forces is reforming and enhancing its copyright laws to recognize digital era productive realities.

Legal scholarship on intellectual property theories have long held the assumption that copyright enables creativity without a strong acceptable universal foundation of empirical research. The theories of copyright focus mostly on developed economies with little empirical or scholarly exploration of the creative dynamics in developing economies. The scholarly debate on the relevance or necessity of a strong copyright regime is even more relevant in the digital era because unauthorized users reproduce copyrighted works at the click of a mouse or the touch of a fingertip. With the advent of the Internet, it is necessary to update copyright laws to protect creative works. Currently, some scholars contend that strong copyright protection has a chilling impact on creativity, which serves instead as a form of corporate protectionism and undue financial welfare. These copyright law scholars contend that copyright law has bloated to protect corporate stakeholders rather than society. This dissertation is a case study of Nollywood, Nigeria’s movie industry, to test the competing hypotheses about whether strong copyright law incentives or discourages the nascent cultural content industries in a developing country. Nollywood is among the three largest film production industries, globally. The rise of Nollywood, from a low budget and technology industry without an effective national copyright regime, seems to support the assertion that creativity might thrive without the restrictions of laws. However, a comparative analysis of the copyright regimes in the United States, India, and Nigeria gives further hindsight of the nuanced intersections at work that support an enhanced copyright regime for the Nigerian film industry. Nollywood film industry is less than thirty years old, which is fairly new compared to Bollywood, a subdivision of the Indian film industry. The jurisprudential experience of Bollywood in combatting the impact of copyright infringement has gone through evolving phases of growth. India and the United States have updated its laws and policies to confront the emerging digital era ecosystem of creativity, unlike Nigeria. Nollywood is an ideal case study to examine competing claims about the impact a copyright law regime weighs on the creative growth of the film industry in a developing economy. Nollywood creative dynamics epitomizes both the need for a strong copyright law and the freedom of creating without restrictions of law. The first narrative about the role of copyright law on Nollywood was that the film industry developed in large part because Nigerian copyright law is weak and enforcement non-existent. The second competing narrative is that a strong copyright regime safeguards creativity in a content industry like Nollywood. According to the second account, Nigeria’s film industry would have developed further, and currently endangered because of weak copyright law. Additionally, this account contends that, film piracy and other infringing activities undermine Nollywood, and prevent it from developing further as true competitors to the U.S. and Indian film industries. My thesis contends that the second school of thought is correct. The Nigerian film industry, through its history and evolution, highlights the importance of Nollywood needing an effective and enhanced copyright regime, which will save the industry from collapse. Nollywood’s creativity is a child of entrepreneurial pursuit. The infringing activities of film pirates undercut the ingenuity of the industry and its creators. Prominent Nollywood filmmakers, either have suspended movie productions, or threatened to stop investing in the industry, because of the impact of copyright infringements. To reconceptualize Nigerian copyright to protect Nollywood’s means of production would be a foundational step to enhance its creativity. Copyright is a necessary tool for the sustained growth of Nollywood and its goals of reaching a global creative competitive edge. At the basic level, an effective Nigerian copyright law and enforcement policy will instill confidence in Nollywood filmmakers about the profitability of their investments. This thesis proposes the reform of Nigeria’s laws to enact an effective digital copyright regime that will give Nollywood filmmakers more protection for their productions. Enacting legal reforms is a modest first step to giving the Nollywood film industry the means to restrain illegal copying. The change to the “law-in-the-books,” will not have the desired effects unless Nigeria ratchets up its copyright enforcement, both non-digital (“analogue”) and digitally. Nigeria should combine a modern digital copyright law with the resources necessary to enforce the law, if Nollywood is to achieve its promise, and evolve further like Bollywood and the U.S. film industries. This thesis concludes that widespread piracy threatens Nollywood and Nigeria’s film industry will soon wither away without copyright reforms that I propose. Apart from critical analysis of concepts, this dissertation adopts doctrinal analysis and examination of theories related to law, development, sociology and culture. This dissertation examines the causes and consequences of widespread piracy and the need to fortify copyright protection in Nigeria, to ensure both economic growth and protection of innovation. Finally, this dissertation argues that an enhanced copyright regime is necessary for Nollywood to flourish and compete in the global market.

The paper looked into the Christian southern Nigerian perception of Islamic Sharia and the response made by the Hausa Muslims of Northern Nigeria in their respective films, Holy Law (Sharia) and Tafarki. This perception and corrective reactions in representing the Sharia in films is the focus of the work. The objective of the paper is to explore the ideals of the Sharia and compare it with what is obtained in the two aforementioned films. A particular focus of the paper is Sharia representation, particularly the penal code system that is perceived to be archaic and inhuman. In gathering the data for the paper, the study asks specifically: is there any positive wisdom attached to the Sharia Penal Code System? What brings about misperception of the Sharia by the Christian film makers of southern Nigeria and how do they perceive the Muslim Hausa of Northern Nigeria? These are some of the ethnographic questions that the paper attempted to answer through an assessment of films that deal with the subject matter of the two geo-political entities of Nigeria. In the end, the paper discovered that the very concept of Sharia was misperceived by the Christian south.

The exploitation of copyright can be achieved in different ways whether direct or indirect for the economic benefit of a country. In Nigeria copyright is exploited positively for the copyright industry generally as well as the entertainment (including the film industry) to be more specific. However, there are culprits using various technology mechanisms to exploit the copyright industry negatively. These culprits are known as pirates, counterfeiters and bootleggers. This paper explores both the positive and the negative sides to the exploitation of copyright. The role of copyright law in the film industry is examined. The issue of piracy and possible solutions are reviewed.

The paper looks at the formative phase of media systems particularly in developing nations. It finds that copyright piracy in those situations serves a purpose not only in providing access to knowledge and creative works to audiences who would otherwise be excluded but also as the original accumulation of media infrastructures, know-how and capital that over time leads to the establishment of original forms of creative expression and legal media industries. Looking at the examples of the publishing of books by foreign authors in 19 th century USA, the emergence of the video film industry in Nigeria and briefly at the popular dance music in northern Brazil it shows the beneficial effects of piracy. From a public policy point of view, the paper then considers the benefits of copyright piracy and its harms, the most severe ones of which are caused by its illegality. In order to balance benefits and harms, it concludes by proposing to legalise small-scale physical copyright piracy in developing nations.

The rise of Nollywood illustrates the revolutionary potential of digital technologies in Africa. Nollywood, or the Nigerian video film industry, reflects technology leapfrogging that is increasingly prominent in Africa today. Such leapfrogging, however, may raise significant issues with respect to legal and other institutions. Film production had largely ceased in Nigeria by the end of the 1980s. Despite this absence, in the early 1990s, Nigeria started on a path that has led it to become the top producer of digital video films in the world. Nigeria is, however, an unlikely locale for the development of a major film industry. In addition to lacking fundamental infrastructures for the development of a film industry, Nigeria has not historically had robust intellectual property enforcement. As a result, Nollywood may be seen as a natural experiment for creativity in the relative absence of intellectual property. This Nollywood natural experiment reflects the actions of varied and at times overlapping roles, including creators, entrepreneurs, and pirates, all of whom have contributed to the growth of Nollywood and Nollywood distribution networks. The viral spread of Nollywood films has thus far been a key element of Nollywood successes. Nollywood films are watched, for example, throughout Africa and in African immigrant communities in Europe and the United States. The Nollywood example suggests the need for more nuanced understanding of the interaction between intellectual property and cultural production and greater recognition of potentially varied ways that intellectual property may influence the shape of cultural production. The unauthorized distribution of Nollywood films is part of wider patterns of increasing unauthorized dissemination of content in the digital era. Such unauthorized distribution has led to pervasive labeling of certain types of copying as piracy. Analyzing the rise of Nollywood can contribute to existing global intellectual property debates and highlight relevant business issues in contemporary contexts of cultural production. Further, consideration of Nollywood’s current growing pains suggests that, as Nollywood continues to grow, industry participants must separate the distinct yet interrelated problems arising from piracy from those emanating from Nollywood’s informality in doing business. This article suggests that in addition to intellectual property enforcement strategies to contain piracy, Nollywood participants must adopt business strategies that monetize piracy by extracting value from wide-reaching Nollywood distribution networks.