Book Review Symposia

Nalule’s book is a comprehensive critical analysis of the energy access and energy poverty issues that plague Sub-Saharan Africa (“SSA”). She conducts this discourse within the energy transition discussion and presents it through the lens of the sustainable development theory.

I am proud to present this book symposium on my book titled, Energy Poverty and Access Challenges in Sub-Saharan Africa: The role of Regionalism (Palgrave, 2019).  With the increasing role of regionalism and globalism, this book discusses the various energy challenges in Africa, and how these can be addressed through regional cooperation.

The way in which State immunity is applied can tell us something about the scale of values of the society in which we live. It is striking, for instance, to note that despite the rhetoric of human dignity in international law, the international community rejects the possibility of a “human rights exception” to immunity but accepts the commercial exception.

The book offers an updated and comprehensive view of the status of the different legal regimes that govern sovereign debt operations. While this book was not written with the outbreak in mind, it provides unique insights into the legal challenges that states and policy makers from the global south ought to consider when facing the challenges of the post Covid-19 world.  The following post offers some takeaways from the book.

The most glaring gap in global economic governance is the lack of an orderly and fair sovereign debt restructuring arrangement.  Annamaria Viterbo’s new volume, Sovereign Debt Restructuring: the Role and Limits of Public International Law, helps us understand why this is so and how we might move forward. 

Multi-sided music platforms are part of the digital creative economy consisting of the various aspects and processes through which creative works are made/produced, distributed and used. In this reflective post, I will discuss the questions posed in the book talk and panel discussion I organised titled “The Digital Creative Economy in Africa: Copyright, Law and Policy”.

Multi-Sided Music Platforms and the Law is a book that provides a well-informed, thorough and rigorous treatment of relevant legal issues from an African perspective, whilst never losing sight of the ‘broader picture’. As such, it is expected to benefit a diverse group of readers, as well as policy and law makers in Africa and abroad in tackling relevant legal conundrums effectively.

The book titled Multi-Sided Music Platforms and the Law: Copyright, Law and Policy in Africa is a timely contribution to literature in this era, with regards to the music boom in Nigeria and other parts of Africa and the existence of music platforms for entertainment as well as commercial purposes. There is a voluminous scholarship in this book on law and multi-sided platforms generally on one hand and copyright law specifically on another. The author focused on the legal and regulatory issues that arise from the use of copyright-protected content by multi-sided platforms in digital advertising.

The structural style of the book is designed to aid easy reference, especially by legal practitioners, judges, lawmakers and policy formulators; to make the book a valuable resource for researchers, academics and students; and an easily comprehensible material for the uninitiated in the field of copyright, privacy and competition law and the operation of multi-sided music platforms. Reading the book from cover to cover, a reader will undoubtedly confirm that the book has achieved this goal.

Recent years have seen a remarkable upturn in scholarship on copyright in Africa in general and its intersection with competition law and policy frameworks in particular. Multi-Sided Music Platforms and the Law takes the discussion further through a detailed examination of global platforms such as YouTube, SoundCloud and Facebook and the profound impact these firms have on the creative sectors and the economy more broadly of developing countries.