OAPI Puts Platform Liability at the Centre of Digital Copyright
The African Intellectual Property Organisation (OAPI) has put forward a draft Directive on Copyright in the Digital Single Market and E-Commerce Platform Liability, according to the policy outline now under discussion. The proposal moves beyond conventional copyright administration and focuses on how online marketplaces and digital platforms should respond when infringing goods or unauthorised digital content circulate through their services.
The draft would seek to harmonise the regulatory approach across OAPI member states and introduce a “Notice and Stay-down” obligation for platforms. If a marketplace receives a qualified notice from a right holder and deliberately delays action, or fails to maintain effective filtering and repeat-infringement controls, it may find it harder to rely on safe-harbour protection. The direction is clear: platforms serving African digital markets may no longer be treated as merely passive channels.
From takedown to preventing repeat infringement
Platform liability debates have often centred on whether a service removed infringing content after being notified. The OAPI draft appears to push the standard further. A stay-down duty requires platforms not only to respond to a specific notice, but also to prevent the same pirated content, counterfeit listing or substantially similar material from reappearing shortly afterwards.
For local e-commerce players such as Jumia, as well as cross-border marketplaces targeting African consumers, a basic complaint mailbox and manual takedown process may no longer be enough. Platforms will need evidence of operational detection tools, merchant controls, repeat-infringer records and response timelines. Without that paper trail, the claim that “the complaint was handled” may carry limited weight.
Safe harbour remains, but the threshold may rise
The proposal should not be read as a wholesale rejection of safe harbour. It is better understood as a tightening of the conditions for relying on it. A platform that has clear knowledge of recurring infringement patterns, yet allows the same merchant or network of merchants to relist infringing goods, may struggle to present itself as a neutral technical intermediary.
This will place pressure on platform compliance systems, but it should not be confused with unlimited monitoring. A more workable model would focus on high-risk product categories, repeat sellers, identified works and frequent complaint targets. The harder policy question for OAPI member states will be how to protect right holders without creating a filtering regime so broad that legitimate trade and lawful user activity are caught in the net.
Right holders will need stronger notices
Greater platform responsibility does not remove the burden on right holders. A qualified notice normally has to identify the right relied upon, the infringing listing or content, the relevant evidence, the lack of authorisation and the requested action. The more precise the notice, the less room a platform has to delay on the ground that the complaint is unclear.
Brands, publishers, software companies and other content owners should prepare rights documents, authorisation chains, product identifiers and online evidence templates before disputes arise. In online marketplace cases, infringers often change store names, images and keywords while keeping the same commercial pattern. A one-off complaint is rarely enough when the real problem is repeated reappearance.
Practical preparation for African digital markets
Companies entering OAPI member state markets should treat the draft as an early compliance signal, not just a copyright story. Copyright registrations, trade mark files, distributor lists, platform monitoring and enforcement workflows need to be connected before infringement becomes visible at scale.
Platform operators should review merchant onboarding, user terms, complaint forms, repeat-infringer sanctions and evidence retention. In a later dispute, the central question may not be whether one listing was removed. It may be whether the platform can reconstruct the full chain of events after receiving a qualified notice, and show that its systems were designed to prevent the same infringement from returning.
