President of the Motion Pictures Practitioners Association of Nigeria (MOPPAN), Abdullahi Maikano has accused some marketers and movie directors of pirating the intellectual properties of their colleagues.
Abdullahi disclosed this on Friday while responding to questions on TVC Breakfast Show.
The MOPPAN President, who was on the show alongside ace producer, Kunle Afolayan. said the involvement of the stakeholders within the industry has made it extremely difficult if not impossible to fight menace. He however called for a collective efforts to tackle piracy rather than going individual as being experienced presently.
His words: “I quite agree with you because there is an incident where it was discovered that a director of a movie is behind the mass production of somebody’s work. He went behind the doors to give out the CDs to marketers to market. And there are some instances where you go into a deal with a marketer to produce a movie and before you know it, the marketer would have produced his own copies and sold them before yours. And by the time you know it, the CDs are already in the markets while you earned nothing. So, there are some people within the house that are not helping matters. You see, I have been saying it, we have been doing our best in fighting piracy, but I think it is not enough. We are have been doing this individually, but I think what is required now is a collective efforts toward fighting piracy.”
Abdulahi however, emphasized the need to fight the menace before it sends those who are doing their genuine business out of market.
He said: ” I think it has become imperative now to collectively fight this war before it begins to send genuine practitioners like Kunle Afolayan out of business.”
He added that, with the return of Cinema, pirates will begin to fizzle out of business as many producers are exploring the platform as against what it used to be in the past.
” I think with the growing interest in Cinema now, pirates would not have a choice but fizzle out of their illegal business. This will be so because many producers will not be showing interest in CDs or DVDs when they can easily make their money from cinema without fear of piracy,” Abdullahi said.
