More than 50 countries now let a rights holder ask a court or a regulator to make internet service providers cut off access to a piracy site, and 39 of them do it actively, according to a 2025 Information Technology and Innovation Foundation review. Nigeria is not on that list.
That matters because Nigeria is where the leakage is worst. IFPI, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, put Nigeria’s piracy rate at 76 percent in its Engaging with Music 2023 study, ahead of China at 75 and India at 74, against 29 percent across its developed-market sample (TorrentFreak).
The biggest hole in African recorded-music revenue sits in the market with the weakest version of the standard remedy. Here is what that remedy is, and what a catalogue owner does without it.
What a blocking order actually blocks
Site blocking is not a takedown. Nothing is deleted. The site keeps running, and the ISP is ordered to stop its own subscribers from reaching it.
- DNS blocking. DNS means Domain Name System, the lookup that turns a domain into a numeric server address. The ISP’s resolver simply refuses to answer for the listed domain. It is cheap, precise, and trivially bypassed with a different resolver or a VPN.
- IP blocking. The ISP drops traffic to the server’s numeric address. Blunter, and it can take down unrelated sites sharing that host.
- Dynamic orders. Pirate operators spin up mirrors within hours. A dynamic order lets the rights holder add newly found mirror domains to an existing order without a fresh hearing.
The legal hook is different in every market
There is no international site-blocking treaty. Each jurisdiction bolted the power onto its own statute.
- United Kingdom: section 97A of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, which lets the High Court injunct a service provider that has actual knowledge of infringement on its network.
- European Union: Article 8(3) of the 2001 InfoSoc Directive, which obliged member states to make injunctions available against intermediaries.
- India: judge-made. The Delhi High Court built the dynamic injunction in UTV Software v. 1337x.to in 2019, with a test for what counts as a “flagrantly infringing” site (SpicyIP).
- Australia: section 115A of the Copyright Act 1968, a purpose-built Federal Court power.
Some markets route through regulators instead, which is how Indonesia blocked 13 stream-ripping sites and how Canadian ISPs were ordered to block the same category.
The limits are real. When Sony Music went past ISPs to target the public DNS resolver Quad9, the Higher Regional Court of Dresden overturned the block in December 2023, holding that resolvers are neutral intermediaries. Blocking stops at the access provider.
What Nigeria has instead
Nigeria is not lawless here. The Copyright Act 2022 gives rights holders a statutory notice-and-takedown route at section 54, including a stay-down obligation at section 54(3), and gives the Nigerian Copyright Commission a blocking power at section 61.
What is missing is the ISP-level machinery to use it at scale. In November 2025 the Commission, acting on a request from IFPI and working with the Nigeria Internet Registration Association, suspended seven infringing domains including val9ja.com.ng, tunesloaded.com.ng and mp3juice.com.ng (The Guardian Nigeria).
That is registry enforcement, not network enforcement. It reaches only the .ng namespace. The same operator re-registers on a .com and is back inside a day. Afrobeats Wire, an independent Nigerian music business title, covered this enforcement gap in detail in September 2026.
South Africa sits in a similar place. Its ISP association has long held that members will block only on a court order or clear statute.
The playbook when blocking is not available
Register the rights before you need them
Every enforcement route starts by proving ownership. A clean ISRC on every recording, consistent UPC and writer splits, and a registered work turn a complaint into an evidenced claim. Unregistered catalogue is unenforceable catalogue.
In Nigeria that is harder than it sounds, because which society is actually licensed to collect has been litigated for years. Register with the one holding a valid approval and keep your own parallel record.
Use section 54 in writing, and log it
Nigerian service providers carry a statutory takedown obligation. Send the notice formally, keep the timestamps, record non-compliance. That log is what a Commission escalation or a future blocking application gets built from.
Escalate through your distributor
Individual artists rarely have the standing that moves IFPI or a registry quickly. The November action ran on IFPI’s request, not on artist complaints. A distributor with catalogue-wide monitoring can fold your recording into an action already in motion.
That is the unglamorous case for regional distribution depth. Delivering into Boomplay, Audiomack and Spotify Nigeria with rights metadata intact produces exactly the record you need when a domain has to be proved infringing rather than merely reported.
