Copied, Cracked and Uncredited: Can Emerging Technologies Tame the Scourge of Copyright Abuse?

A right that exists, a right that is ignored

Every creative act begins as an idea in one mind and, in the digital economy, can end as a million unauthorised copies within hours. Software, music, film, books and code are intellectual property: creations of the mind that the law protects so that their makers can benefit from them. Of the forms that protection takes, including patents, trademarks and copyright, it is copyright that guards most digital content, and it is copyright that is most routinely abused.

Copyright grants an author exclusive rights to reproduce, publish, perform, adapt and distribute a work for a period fixed by law. Zambia’s Copyright and Performance Rights Act of 1994 expressly protects computer programs alongside literary, musical and artistic works. A common misconception deserves correction, i.e., copyright is not acquired by registering with the Patents and Companies Registration Agency (PACRA), whose mandate covers industrial property such as patents and trademarks. Copyright arises once an original work is recorded in material form, and its owner may sue for infringement, seeking damages or an injunction. The test is originality, not novelty; novelty is the language of patents.

Yet a right that exists on paper is too often ignored in practice. BSA’s 2018 Global Software Survey estimated that 37 percent of software installed on personal computers worldwide was unlicensed, with the Middle East and Africa at 56 percent and neighbouring Zimbabwe at 89 percent. Behind such figures lie cracked activation keys, pirated media, plagiarised code and, increasingly, content lifted through hacking and social engineering.

Why abuse matters

The economic argument is simple. If creators cannot earn a return, they stop investing, and the software, publishing and entertainment industries that depend on them shrink. For firms whose competitive edge rests on proprietary code and processes, infringement is a corporate risk, translating into diluted products, lost market share and, at worst, closure and lost livelihoods. The harm also rebounds on the infringer. BSA estimates that malware linked to unlicensed software costs companies worldwide nearly $359 billion a year. The pirate, in other words, often pays twice.

Who is liable?

Direct infringement occurs when a person copies, distributes or performs a work without permission. In several jurisdictions, contributory liability may attach to those who knowingly facilitate infringement, such as service providers, and vicarious liability to those who control and profit from it; employers can thus answer for employees who install pirated office software. End-user licence agreements (EULAs) define what a licensee may do and typically limit the licensor’s liability for damage the software causes.

Copyright’s purpose, however, is not merely to reward authors but to promote learning and creativity. Exceptions therefore permit certain uses: Zambia’s Act lists acts that do not constitute infringement, while other jurisdictions such as the United States, fair use weighs the purpose of the use, the nature of the work, the amount taken and the effect on the market. Open-source licences go further, inviting others to build freely on a work.

Emerging technologies as remedy

Lawsuits alone cannot keep pace with digital copying. Emerging technologies offer a different model: detect, prove and pay, automatically and at scale.

Fingerprinting is the most mature. YouTube’s Content ID matches uploads against reference files supplied by rights holders. According to YouTube’s Copyright Transparency Report, it had paid rights holders $12 billion in advertising revenue by December 2024, and in 2025 rights holders chose to monetise over 90 percent of claims rather than block them. Detection, in other words, can convert infringement into income.

Cryptographic provenance is next. The C2PA Content Credentials standard attaches tamper-evident, cryptographically signed records of how a file was created and changed; notably, it is not digital rights management and restricts nothing. Its value lies in making authorship verifiable rather than assumed.

Blockchain completes the picture. WIPO’s white paper observes that blockchain could automate the processes of collective management organisations, while smart contracts could calculate royalties and distribute them among rights holders, a prospect with obvious appeal for musicians and authors whose earnings are lost between intermediaries.

The questions we must ask

Technology is no panacea. The same YouTube report found that over 6 percent of videos targeted through its public removal webform in 2025 were subject to abusive requests, likely false assertions of ownership. Automated enforcement can be turned against the very creators it should protect. Generative AI raises a deeper dilemma: the United States Copyright Office has concluded that training AI on copyrighted works may implicate owners’ exclusive rights, with fair use turning on case-specific facts such as purpose and market harm. The technologies proposed as remedies may themselves become the next frontier of dispute.

For Zambia and the region, the lesson is twofold. Legal reform, enforcement capacity and public awareness remain indispensable, because technology amplifies whatever governance surrounds it. But creators, collecting societies, universities and regulators should also begin building the digital infrastructure, from fingerprint registries to provenance standards and automated royalty systems, that allows African creativity to be traced, protected and paid for. The question is no longer whether copyright can be enforced in a digital age, but whether we will build systems that enforce it fairly.

Sources

**RIS Contributors are researchers and practitioners writing for CCET's Research Intelligence Service; views are the author's own

Primary sources

•      Government of the Republic of Zambia (1994). Copyright and Performance Rights Act, 1994 (Act No. 44 of 1994), as amended. ZambiaLII

•      Google (2026). YouTube Copyright Transparency Report

•      C2PA (2025). Content Credentials: frequently asked questions. Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity

•      U.S. Copyright Office (2025). Copyright and Artificial Intelligence, Part 3: Generative AI Training (pre-publication version). Washington, DC

•      World Intellectual Property Organization (2022). Blockchain technologies and IP ecosystems: A WIPO white paper. Geneva: WIPO

Research

•      BSA | The Software Alliance (2018). Software management: Security imperative, business opportunity. 2018 BSA Global Software Survey. Washington, DC: BSA

•      BSA | The Software Alliance (2018). BSA’s 2018 Global Software Survey shows unlicensed software use still widespread (press release)

Copyright, Intellectual Property, Emerging Technologies