Borrowed Glory and Stolen Credit: Why Nigeria Must Get Serious About Copyright (2) By Olaitan Adesina

Borrowed Glory and Stolen Credit: Why Nigeria Must Get Serious About Copyright (2)

By Olaitan Adesina

If music theft is loud, intellectual theft on blogs and social media is whisper-quiet and far more pervasive. It’s usually just copy, paste, and a confident tone. Someone spends hours researching, writing, editing, and publishing. Another person screenshots it, trims off the byline, reposts it as “copied” with no credit to the original author, and harvests engagement like a farmer who never planted a seed.

In Nigeria’s digital space, authorship is treated as decoration. Attribution is optional. Consent is inconvenient. The result is a shadow economy of stolen ideas that rewards speed over integrity and virality over originality.

Anyone who writes regularly knows the ritual. Your piece appears on a blog you have never heard of. Your paragraphs are broken into slides. Your analysis is repackaged as a thread with your name missing. Sometimes your own headline returns to you rewritten in clumsy English but carrying your exact argument. You suddenly find out your post has gone viral on WhatsApp groups but your name is missing from the byline. You confront the offender and receive the familiar response: “It is public domain.” No, it is not. The internet is not a no man’s land without ownership. Publication does not dissolve authorship.

This culture thrives on the mechanics of platforms like Facebook and Instagram where algorithms reward frequency and frictionless sharing. The faster a page posts, the more visible it becomes. Original research slows you down. Copy and paste accelerates you. So theft becomes strategy, and strategy becomes habit.

It is not only obscure pages that do this. Influential accounts often launder other people’s work into bite-sized virality. A long-form article becomes a meme. A carefully sourced essay becomes a punchy caption. The original writer disappears, and is replaced by the aura of the aggregator. We applaud the thief and forget the owner.

I know this terrain well because I have lived it. When an international publication like Rolling Stone or Time properly credits a Nigerian writer, it feels less like routine professionalism and more like a rare act of recognition. That is how low our expectations have fallen. Credit should be the floor, not the ceiling.

Even the influencer economy blurs the line between commentary and appropriation. A viral page lifts a writer’s perspective, paraphrases it with minor cosmetic changes, and posts it as fresh insight. Followers cheer the originality that never existed. When challenged, the defence is always the same: “We reshaped it.” Reshaping without acknowledgement is still theft. Style cannot disinfect grand larceny.

The damage is not merely emotional. It is economic and archival. Writers lose traffic, opportunities, and bargaining power. Some even lose dignity and become depressed or even suicidal. The public record becomes distorted as original sources are buried beneath louder copies. Over time, the plagiarist is cited as an authority while the author is treated as an impostor.

This is why digital intellectual property must be defended with the same seriousness we demand in music and other forms of artistic expression. The principle does not change because the medium is text instead of sound. Labour is labour. Imagination is property. Attribution is justice in its simplest form and is often the only benefit writers get for their labour.

Writers and editors must insist on visible credit, working links, and permission for republication. Platforms must enforce reporting mechanisms that do more than generate automated replies. Brands that commission “content” must verify authorship before promotion. And readers must cultivate the discipline of asking a basic question: who wrote this first?

There is also a moral responsibility for public figures who benefit from amplification. When a well-known account reposts without credit, it normalizes theft for thousands who imitate the practice. Influence should elevate standards, not dilute them. The difference between curation and exploitation is acknowledgement.

Nigeria cannot build a knowledge economy on borrowed paragraphs. We cannot complain about stolen melodies while celebrating stolen essays. The same ethical spine must hold across art forms. Whether it is a photo or a thesis, a lyric or a long read, the rule is unchanged: if you did not make it, you must name who did.

We often say legacy matters. Legacy is not built only by what we create but by how we treat what others create. If we want a culture that respects creativity, we must start with the smallest act of justice available to us online. Credit the source. Seek permission. Pay when required. And when you err, correct it loudly.

Anything less is theft, PERIOD.

Just Me… THINKING OUT LOUD!

_Olaitan Adesina is a poet and author of Agidigbo: Soliloquy in Verse. He writes from Akure._