The Oloture Dispute is Not Just A Question of Law, It Is An Examination of EbonyLife’s Business Ethics.
Sometime in 2013, Tobore Ovuorie, a Nigerian journalist, went undercover into a sex trafficking ring to uncover the truth about sex work and international sex trafficking in Nigeria. In the course of her underground work, Tobore was tagged “Forza Speciale” to indicate her high value as commodity in the sex-trafficking trade. She was starved, whipped, and raped by the traffickers. She witnessed a murder and was nearly trafficked before she escaped from her captors at the Nigeria/Benin Seme Border. At the time of her escape, Tobore had been made to sign an agreement of indenture and was given a new identity as a Kenyan.
Tobore chronicled her experience in a five-part 2014 report, “Investigation: Inside Nigeria’s Ruthless Human Trafficking Mafia”, published by Nigeria’s Premium Times Newspaper in collaboration with Amsterdam’s Zam Chronicles. Tobore continues to suffer post-traumatic stress from her ordeal with the sex traffickers and is reportedly still undergoing therapy as at the time of this article.
Oloture is a Netflix Original film produced by EbonyLife Films (“EbonyLife”) and released by Netflix in October 2020. The film follows the journey the eponymous Oloture, a Nigerian journalist who goes undercover into a sex trafficking ring to uncover the truth about sex work and international sex trafficking in Nigeria. During her investigation, Oloture is tagged “Forza Speciale” to indicate her high value as commodity in the sex trafficking trade. She is whipped and raped by the traffickers. Oloture witnesses a murder. She is forced to sign an agreement of indenture and is given a new Kenyan identity before she is trafficked out of Nigeria from the Nigeria/Benin Seme border.
Ebonylife claims that the Oloture story is fictional. In a recent statement, Mo Abudu, CEO of EbonyLife media says:
“Oloture could never be Tobore’s life story, as she has claimed. Indeed, so many women around the world who are trafficked to Italy have similar stories.”
The story credit for Oloture is attributed to Mo Abudu, Temidayo Abudu ( daughter of Mo Abudu), Heidi Uys (Head of Programming of EbonyLife Tv), South Africa’s Craig Freimond, and Nigeria’s Yinka Ogun. The writing credits are attributed to Craig Freimond and Yinka Ogun.
To paint a full picture, it is important to add that press runs following the release of Oloture markets the film as “inspired by” Tobore’s story. Abudu also notes that, “certain incidents in Oloture are similar to what happened to Tobore.” Also, an end credit in the film reads:
“Thank you to Premium Times and Tobore Ovuorie. And all Journalists who go undercover to expose the truth for inspiring this film.”
Tobore’s report with Premium Times is the only project explicitly named in the end credits of the film. EbonyLife has also admitted that it “gratuitously committed to donating five percent of the profit derived from the theatrical run of the movie” in support of any NGO founded by Tobore to advance the campaign against human/sex trafficking. The movie did not have any theatrical run.
Allegation of Plagiarism/Copyright Infringement
Tobore claims that the film Oloture plagiarizes her work with Premium times and maintains that she owns the story. Premium Times disputes Tobore’s claim and alleges that the journalist was an employee under contract at the time the investigative report was produced. As such, the magazine claims that it holds the copyright to Tobore’s report.
Native Magazine reports that Tobore has, through her legal representatives, made a written demand for compensation and appropriate acknowledgment. The International Center for Investigative Journalism reports that EbonyLife has refuted the claim. The studio’s strategy is to tag Tobore’s claim as “disparaging”, demand a retraction, and threaten legal action. EbonyLife justifies their strategy with a two-pronged defense: they obtained the consent of Premium Times magazine to use Tobore’s story so they have satisfied the requirement of copyright law, and Oloture is a “work of fiction inspired by a variety of true events”.
Absence of Prior Consent
It is important to point out that according to Mo Abudu’s Instagram post, the studio began shooting Oloture on the 5th of November, 2018. While Ebony Life has made a point of emphasizing that it obtained the consent of Premium Times, the Native Magazine article notes that the studio wrote to Premium Times on the 3oth of May, 2019, well after they had written and likely completed filming of the adaptation of the work they were requesting license to adapt. It is instructive that EbonyLife’s request was submitted on a Thursday and by the next Monday, a mere three days after, Premium Times had given its consent. The film began its festival run a few months later, debuting at the renowned Carthage Film Festival in Tunisia.
An obvious inference to be drawn from this is: incredible as it seems, EbonyLife adapted Tobore’s report to film, with the intention to exploit and financially profit off her life story and her creative/journalistic effort without seeking Tobore’s prior consent and without any compunction for failing to seek Tobore’s consent. Even more damning is the idea that the studio only sought and obtained a fast-tracked consent from Premium Times after filming and shooting was complete and presumably when they were dressing the film for its festival rounds. To put it bluntly: EbonyLife thought nothing of exploiting, without the consent of the subject, the story and trauma of a rape survivor who put her life on the line for the social good of uncovering a syndicate of sex traffickers and their patrons.
If we chuck up the failure to seek prior consent as an oversight, and we tag the rushed consent obtained from Premium Times as ill-advised. What do we call the steady stream of threats, bullying, and gaslighting that EbonyLife has kept up against Tobore?
Image/ Life Story Rights.
In film adaptation projects such as Oloture, the starting point is typically the Copyright legislation. The question: “Who holds the Copyright in the literary work to be adapted?” is the most important legal question but it is hardly the most important thing to consider in the project. The producers must consider the author’s moral rights (i.e. the irrevocable right of an author to regulate the revision, alteration, or distortion of their work regardless of who holds the copyright), the privacy right of the subjects portrayed in the film, and the journalism/publishing industry customs and rules of ethics. These rights and prescriptions are not always backed by legislation, but they are sustained by an unwritten understanding as potent as law, a social contract. Image rights and Life Story rights are two of such extra-legal protections.
Image rights operate from the premise that individuals should have an inalienable right to determine how their identity is exploited while Life-Story rights protect (regardless of the copyright exceptions to history and facts) the right of a person to regulate how their life experiences are represented. These rights might not be protected in legislative texts, but they are adopted as global film-making customary practice and are often afforded the same level of respect given to legal prescriptions. This intra-industry commitment to respecting the dignity of extra-industry subjects fosters the relationship between filmmakers and their potential audience.
The First-Mover’s Responsibility
With the Netflix campaign to get more African content on its platform, Nigerian cinema is gradually shedding the negative stereotype that has plagued it internationally. We are now able to distribute our films to a diverse global audience and showcase a film culture that is far removed from the flash, bang, and low-quality images that was the home-video era. With this shift in perception, our film industry has caught the attention of world’s big studios and inter-studio deals now are in the offing. The Nigerian studios that secure these early global partnerships necessarily carry, along with the first-movers advantage, the responsibility of setting the tone for how future deals will be conducted. How these first-movers introduce the industry will determine the terms with which global businesses will deal with our film industry for the next few decades.
Anyone who has sat at a table to negotiate an international deal for a Nigerian entity understands the challenge of repeatedly fighting to be considered an equal player in the game. The jokes about our broken legal system are tired, and the remarks about our inept and corrupt commercial ecosystem are as trite as they are infuriating. As Nollywood takes its seat at these international tables, it must decide if it will collapse into old cliches or if it will chisel out a better and more dignified face.
Get this: the world’s big studios operate in jurisdictions that have robust legal and ethical systems that make for the best film industry practices. They know exactly what should happen in a system that works but, as with any money-driven venture, they also know how to take advantage of a broken system. The history of Western-African relationships assures us that Western corporations will exploit every loophole we present to derive the most amount of value for the least possible investment.
The responsibility falls on the first movers to present our film industry as an ecosystem that commands the same level of dignity afforded our international counterparts. Our first-movers cannot afford to be myopic, cannot afford to choose short-term business wins over creating structures that will serve the industry long term. With the Oloture project, Ebony life Studios was presented with the opportunity to apply Image and Life Story rights as an industry custom supplementing the watery provisions of our Copyright legislations. Unfortunately, the studio bungled the opportunity.
Mo Abudu has called on us to “educate ourselves on how the film industry works and how stories are developed and what inspires them.” The inference to be drawn is that the Oloture Project conformed with industry global best standards and ethics; this suggestion is flawed. When Netflix sought to adapt “How Anna Delvey Tricked New York’s Party People”, an investigative report about a convicted fraudster published by New York Magazine, the journalist who authored the piece, Jessica Presssler, was represented at the negotiation table to discuss rights acquisition even before the screenplay was written.
In comparison, with the Oloture project, EbonyLife wrote and shot a film based on the traumatizing experiences of Tobore, a journalist who risked her life for an undercover investigation into a sex trafficking ring without obtaining prior consent.
Abudu also appears committed to pushing the narrative that because certain elements of the film are different from Tobore’s experiences, then the journalist has no valid Life Story claim. This is not how the film industry works. Life Story rights do not suggest that a film adaptation is an exact and true copy of the life experiences of the subject, the industry permits filmmakers the creative license to invent portions of the plot to help drive character and film development. Rather, Life Story rights acknowledge that a film project borrows so heavily from the life of the subject that the resultant film is easily identifiable as the story of the subject. A useful example is to examine the film, “The Theory of Everything,” a film based on the life-story of renowned physicist, Stephen Hawking. While there is no dispute that the film is based on Hawking’s life story, this Slate article chronicles bits of the film where the producers employ creative license with the story, fictionalizing and modifying parts of Hawking’s story to help with story development in the film. Do the fictionalized bits change the fact that the core story is Hawkins? No. As with Hawkins so also with the exonerated Central Park Five, so with Madam CJ Walker, and a host of others whose lives have been set into film including Tobore.
As such, while it is true that there will be some common experiences in the story of women who are victims of sex trafficking around the world, it is undeniable that Tobore’s story is the only widely known story of a Nigerian reporter who goes undercover into a sex trafficking ring, is re-nationalized as Kenyan, and escapes at the Seme border. Too many of the minute details of the film mirror the minute details of Tobore’s experiences. These facts and the fact that EbonyLife has admitted to using Tobore’s report as “research” material in the making of the Oloture are the facts the industry must consider to determine Life Story attribution.
Ebonylife’s Oloture and the studio’s attempt to push an untrue narrative about how film industries operate is not only an erosion of Tobore’s Moral, Image and Life Story rights, but is also derision of the collective sensibilities of all players in Nigeria’s film industry.
Relying on the Loopholes
While businesses are allowed, expected even, to take advantage of legal loopholes that benefit them, we must, as a society, insist on and cultivate an expectation of scruples from businesspeople. While it is permissible to test the extent of copyright protection, the Oloture project should not have been the test subject.
Is it possible that Tobore’s story might fall under one of the exceptions excluded from copyright protection under the law? Yes.
Is it possible that Premium Times is the lawful holder of the copyright in the undercover report? Probably.
But these aren’t the only questions we should be asking. We should wonder why Nigeria’s top film-making studio committed itself to exploiting Tobore’s trauma and pain without even speaking to Tobore first, much less obtaining her prior consent. We should ask if Abudu’s statement is not in effect a dismissal of Tobore’s trauma, this idea that what Tobore experienced is not special or unique to her so she should gladly take what the studio has gratuitously given. We should also wonder if there is a good faith justification to releasing private text messages showing Abudu’s ostensible acts of financial charity when Tobore’s father died. Is it ethical that we are receiving updates about Tobore’s relationship with her lawyers from Abudu’s press release?
To say we should ask these questions is not to request compassion for Tobore but to insist that she be afforded dignity and the most basic of human decency. That EbonyLife shows no circumspection in how they have handled Tobore’s request must rile our collective indignation and Nigeria’s film industry must decide what it is beholden to: justice or demagoguery.
Without doubt, setting Tobore’s story to film is a step in the right direction for our film culture but whatever gains are made from this stride are immediately diminished by EbonyLife’s questionable ethical practices. Oloture is the first Nigerian journalism article adapted into a feature length film for a global platform like Netflix. Unfortunately, this project that should be a celebrated landmark moment in our film culture has been so poorly handled by key players, and the shoddiness has played out under the keen eyes of international players.
