Abstract :
[en] The video industry in Nigeria has developed within a widely informal economic environment in which the illicit reproduction and circulation of goods were the rule rather than the exception. The informality of circulation has played a particularly influential role in both the history of the video industry and the genesis of the present crisis. While, on the one hand, it has made videos available all over the African continent and within the diaspora, creating the basis for Nollywood’s international success, it has, on the other hand, weakened the industry’s economy, exposing it to consecutive cycles of saturation and collapse. For this reason, the production crisis that emerged over the past few years has catalyzed numerous controversies concerning the structure of the video economy and the rules that regulate it. The informality on which the video economy has been based since its inception is today often considered a threat to the survival of the industry itself. While the industry has achieved global recognition, the economic fragility of its success has provoked growing anxiety. This anxiety has been progressively concentrated, by both media and video entrepreneurs, on issues of piracy and copyright protection.
The aim of this chapter is to investigate the causes of this anxiety and the role that piracy and transformations in copyright legislation have had in catalysing it, while shaping the economy of the industry. Throughout this chapter I will argue that when the uncontrolled circulation of goods begins to undermine the economic basis of the industry that produces them, the rhetoric of piracy is mobilized to ensure the accessibility to the economy of both the production and the distribution of the goods themselves. This allows some of the entrepreneurs involved in the production process to gain exclusive control over it and the capital it generates. Within the Nigerian context, the rhetorical construction of piracy and the legal and economic consequences of this construction are the result of specific conflicts among different segments of the Nigerian video industry and, more precisely, different models of economic entrepreneurship. As the history of the Nigerian video phenomenon shows, a loose copyright regime seems to have positive consequences for the emergence and early development of a creative industry, although, once the industry seeks to attain higher levels of profitability, it tends to become problematic, and the rhetoric of piracy can become a tool to orient processes of restructuration of the cultural industry’s economy. In relation to this dynamic, I analyse the way in which the normative orders that regulate the reproduction and circulation of images and contents developed within the Nigerian context, and I discuss how their introduction and implementation progressively shaped people’s perception of legal and illegal practices in the field of local cultural production.
