Copy and Paste Law-making: Legislative Plagiarism and the Question of Ownership of Copyright in Statutes

Abstract

Law-making process involves much ingenuity on the part of the lawmakers. Laws are made to suit the local circumstances of the territory the law is to be applied. A proposed Bill is involved in a lot of legislative processes to become a law. The Berne Convention allows for flexibility amongst countries to decide on the copyright status of official texts, including written laws. Most countries chose to allow written laws to remain in the public domain. Therefore, a statute is not eligible for copyright protection. Nigeria has no specific provision for the copyright status of written laws. However, where the proposed Bill did not complete the legislative process of transposing into law, it remains the intellectual property of the lawmaker who introduced the Bill. The discussions leading to these conclusions are the focus of this paper. This paper considers the extant laws of Nigeria and existing literature on the issues discussed herein in making a submission on the copyright status of written law as well as a Bill. This paper also discusses the issue of legislative plagiarism which involves the copying of foreign laws by Nigerian lawmakers and introducing same as Bills to be enacted into law in Nigeria.