Virtually every legal system of the world provides for the protection of intellectual property rights. Intellectual property rights, essentially, are legal rights resulting from intellectual activities. In other words they are rights, deliberately granted by governments, over creations of human intellect. Generally, the rights granted enable holders to exercise control over the doing of certain acts as regards their intellectual creations, which in the main are of commercial value. This means, intellectual property rights are exclusive and negative in nature, as they stop all others from engaging in certain activities relating to intellectual creations without the permission or licence of the right holder, even if they have independently developed the subject matter of protection.

Intellectual property legal standards provide protection for various forms of intellectual property and these include literary, artistic and other related works, inventions in any field of technology, designs and marks. Traditionally, the types of intellectual property rights granted over the various forms of intellectual creations are broadly classified into two: ‘industrial property’ and ‘copyright’. Industrial property rights, among others, encompass patents granted for inventions and trademarks granted in respect of marks and other trading symbols. Copyright is for literary and artistic works, performances and others.

Legislative texts are ordinarily of the nature of literary works within public domain since it form part of public documents generated in the course of the activities of an organ of government. It is therefore a misconception to hold the view that all legislative texts and government works (such as maps, brochures, reports, etc.) are all in the public domain without copyrights implications. In order to state with finality which part of legislative texts or executive and judicial documents are protected by copyright and which are not, it is imperative to have recourse to the provisions and practice of copyrights system of a jurisdiction concern. Against the above backdrop, this paper focuses on the copyright aspect of intellectual property rights with a bias for literary works of legislative nature under the Nigerian copyrights system.