Ukrainian director Andriy Pryymachenko said that the authors of HBO’s Chernobyl series without permission used his video work in episode 1 of the mini-series.
The dispute is about the visualization of the recording of telephone conversations on April 26, 1986 of the dispatcher of the central fire communication center with the dispatchers of the militarized fire department of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. The Ukrainian created it on the basis of decoding audio recordings of telephone conversations that can be found on the Internet in free access.
This video was published by Pryymachenko in 2013.
“That moment when HBO used my video in the TV series “Chernobyl”. Very happy to be a small part of this project (although my permission was not asked)! For years, I was interested in and how I could popularize the topic of the Chernobyl disaster and now – an unexpected turn”, Andriy Pryymachenko wrote on his Facebook page.
Fragment of the video from the HBO series
Priymachenko wrote to the Chernobyl director Craig Mazin on Twitter with a proposal to start a dialogue. He pointed to the important evidence that the video was copied – to the same error in decoding in two videos, when instead of the “Начсостав” (“Head of staff’) on the screen appears “Наш состав” (“Our staff”).
However, instead of Mazin, the lawyers of the studio provided the answer, saying that the studio was engaged in visualization independently and the authorship of the video belongs to HBO.
Pryymachenko stresses that it would be enough for him to simply mention his authorship, without paying monetary compensation to him. However, such a reaction of HBO and studio lawyers are forcing Ukrainians to initiate legal proceedings.