U.S. pay television network HBO may have violated Ukraine’s law during the production of its award-winning “Chernobyl” miniseries.
Several Ukrainian individuals and institutions have recently accused HBO of copyright infringement: Filmmaker Andriy Pryymachenko, the family of acclaimed photographer Igor Kostin, as well as two state enterprises working with films — all have noticed some of their works being featured in “Chernobyl” with no authorization.
Chornobyl nuclear accident survivor Lyudmyla Ignatenko didn’t know she was one of the main characters in the 2019 HBO series until she saw the show’s trailer. She’s suing the television network for using her and her husband’s names in the miniseries without her consent. This is the only allegation that HBO addressed, saying she didn’t object to her story being used.
Although the first public claims of copyright infringement were made right after the show aired almost two years ago, HBO still hasn’t commented on the issue.
The Kyiv Post reached out to HBO for comment but hasn’t heard back yet.
The Ukrainians accusing the HBO of copyright infringement say they don’t want financial compensation right now, but only to be included in the show’s credits.
They hope that the case will encourage other Ukrainians to fight to protect their intellectual property.
“Our main goal is to change the country’s attitude towards copyright and its protection,” says Natalia Gnatiuk, a lawyer who represents some of the Ukrainian HBO accusers.
Big surprise
The five-piece miniseries “Chernobyl” spotlights the worst nuclear power disaster in human history, which happened in then-Soviet Ukraine on April 26, 1986.
Released in May 2019, the series has taken the globe by storm, becoming the highest-rated television show ever, according to the Internet Movie Database, or IMDb.
The first episode features a phone conversation between the fire brigade dispatchers on the day of the explosion in Chornobyl, visualized as captions. According to Ukrainian Pryymachenko, that footage was produced by him.
Pryymachenko says he heard the recorded phone conversations in the 1993 Ukrainian film “On That Morning, April 26,” and decided to share it with the world.
To make the one-minute conversation more powerful, he visualized it as old-style captions. Since the recording belongs to the state enterprise Ukrainian Studio of Chronicle and Documentary Films, or Ukrkinohronika, Pryymachenko first signed an agreement with the enterprise to use the audio for his work.
In 2013, Pryymachenko posted the video on his YouTube channel, calling it “The most horrifying phone conversation of the 20th century.”
Years after he shared the video, Pryymachenko was surprised to see the exact copy of it in the first episode of “Chernobyl.” At first, the filmmaker was excited to become a part of such a great project. But the excitement soon changed into disturbance as Pryymachenko couldn’t find his name in the titles.
“I thought it was some kind of mistake,” Pryymachenko told the Kyiv Post.
He soon started reaching out to HBO asking for explanations, to no avail. He tried to contact the series’ writer and producer Craig Mazin on Twitter, asking him to discuss the issue.
Nearly two years later, HBO hasn’t officially commented on the matter.
The filmmaker says he was contacted by the British production company Sister that also worked on the miniseries. According to Pryymachenko, representatives of the production company stated that they were the creators of the visualization used in “Chernobyl,” which he says wasn’t true.
The Kyiv Post requested a comment from Sister but hasn’t heard back.
Pryymachenko says the visualization featured in “Chernobyl” has the same mistake as he made in his 2013 video: While transcribing the conversation between the dispatchers, Pryymachenko wrote, “nash sostav” (“our crew” in English) instead of “nachsostav” (“officers crew”).
“It’s a fatal mistake for them because it is a confirmation that no one created anything but just copied the work that Andriy (Pryymachenko) published,” says Gnatiuk, Pryymachenko’s lawyer.
Soon after “Chernobyl,” Pryymachenko noticed the same visualization featured in the third episode of “Inside Bill’s Brain: Decoding Bill Gates,” a documentary series by Netflix. About a month after Pryymachenko reached out to Netflix, the company added his name to the episode’s titles.
More allegations
Pryymachenko was the first but not the only Ukrainian to accuse HBO.
The state enterprise Ukrkinochronika followed Pryymachenko’s example, announcing copyright infringement claims in April this year. The company owns the rights for audio of the phone conversation that was visualized by Pryymachenko. It says that HBO didn’t contact the company for permission to use it.
Another state enterprise, Ukrainian Television Film Studio, or Ukrtelefilm, also said that HBO violated its rights.
The Ukrtelefilm’s head Taras Avrakhov said to Detector Media news outlet on April 28, that HBO used fragments of their 1986 documentary “Chornobyl: Two Colors of Time,” in the fifth episode of the miniseries.
Gnatiuk says that the episode contains several shots that belong to Ukrtelefilm.
The lawyer also represents the family of Ukrainian photographer Kostin, best known for his photographs of the ruined nuclear power plant after the explosion. Some of his shots have also allegedly been used in the miniseries without the permission of his family.
According to Gnatiuk, the accusers of HBO don’t want to go to court, seeing it as the worst-case scenario. They also don’t seek monetary compensations, but only to be credited in the show.
“All this time it was quite difficult to communicate with the representatives of HBO,” Gnatiuk says. “Only after state enterprises announced their copyright infringement claims, some sort of dialogue has begun.”
A scene from the 2019 “Chernobyl” HBO miniseries feature Irish actress Jessie Buckley portraying Lyudmyla Ignatenko, a Chornobyl nuclear accident survivor, whose firefighter husband died after extinguishing the plant. Ignatenko is now suing the U.S. television network for using her and her husband’s names in the miniseries without her consent. (Courtesy)
Person vs. corporation
The most controversial case, however, concerns Lyudmyla Ignatenko, the wife of Vasyl Ignatenko, one of the firefighters killed by radiation after trying to extinguish the fire at the plant.
The two are among the leading characters of the miniseries.
In the interview with BBC, 57-year-old Ignatenko says she found out that she and her husband became the protagonists of the series after seeing an advertisement on TV.
“When I found out that there would be a film about me, of course, it was offensive and unpleasant. Why not ask me, talk to me, prepare me as a person?” Ignatenko said during the interview.
Ignatenko’s lawyer, Oleksandr Mamunya, says that the woman had the hardest time after the series was released: Some of Ignatenko’s acquaintances started blaming and bullying her for “making money on her late husband.” The new publicity and the increased attention from the media made Ignatenko move from her apartment in Kyiv outside of the capital.
In an interview with BBC News, Ignatenko said that some representatives of HBO from Moscow had contacted her, asking to become a “consultant” of then-upcoming miniseries. She says the representatives contacted her several times, asking about some details, but never mentioning her story would be used in the series.
According to her lawyer, Ignatenko never gave HBO permission to use her and her husband’s names. The fact that they used it anyway is a violation of Ukraine’s legislation, he says.
According to Ukraine’s Civil Code, the use of a person’s name in any literary or other works, except for documentaries, as a character, is allowed only after a person’s consent.
The HBO statement published by BBC says that the local representatives of the production team had “multiple exchanges” with Ignatenko before, during, and after filming. According to the statement, Ignatenko had the opportunity to participate in the storytelling and she never expressed that she didn’t wish her or her husband’s story to be featured in the film.
Mamunya says that it might be the company’s low awareness of the Ukrainian legislation that had caused the issue. According to the lawyer, it doesn’t matter whether they contacted her or not, if Ignatenko didn’t consent to use her and her husband’s name.
In 2020, Ignatenko filed a lawsuit against HBO in a Ukrainian court, claiming ceasing violation of her rights and moral damage compensation.
According to her lawyer, the network’s representatives started participating in the court hearings only recently, saying that they were not aware of the process before. The next hearing is scheduled for June 14.
Pryymachenko says that despite all the controversy, the whole situation might initiate a positive shift in Ukraine, where a person’s intellectual property is not as valued and protected as in the West.
“(In Ukraine), when the author alleges copyright infringement he is told to be thankful that someone paid attention to his work,” Pryymachenko says.
“This is not how it should be.”
