Speaking to SaharaReporters during the 2019 Ake festival, Idaha said
he was just a witness to the case, and it was the owner of Raconteur
Productions, Chioma Onyenwe, who took the case to court and had moved
on with his life after his testimony in court.
Jude Idaha, a Nigerian Canad-based scriptwriter, says he did not drag
Omoli Oboli to court over Okafor’s Law's copyright infringement
controversy.
Speaking to SaharaReporters during the 2019 Ake festival, Idaha said
he was just a witness to the case, and it was the owner of Raconteur
Productions, Chioma Onyenwe, who took the case to court and had moved
on with his life after his testimony in court.
However, he stated that allegations made against Oboli were facts.
“I was just a witness in the case. I wasn’t the one who took the case
to the court, Chioma did. For me, I just moved on. I don’t want to be
loaned by Okafor’s Law— by that screenplay.
“I think I’m bigger than it and I have done so much work after it than
for me to go back on it. I have done plays, films, movies, written
books, and I have won awards after that after. After my testimony in
court, I had nothing to do with it anymore, it was Chioma who
continuously took it up but on the case, the truth will always remain
the truth,” Idaha explained.
Idaha had accused Oboli, Nollywood actress, producer, and scriptwriter
of copyright infringement on the movie, Okafor’s Law, claiming that
she had stolen his story idea for the movie in September 2016.
He alleged that Oboli took the work he had done regarding Okafor’s
Law, and developed it without giving him due credit.
Afterward, it was gathered that Idaha had gone ahead to send a letter
of demand and instituted a copyright infringement suit.
But that did not stop Oboli who went ahead to fix March 31, 2017, as a
release date for the movie.
The legal tussle resulted in a ban on the movie to be shown at cinemas.
However, the ban was eventually lifted as a court presided over by
Justice Ibrahim Buba ruled that what was exhibited by the plaintiff is
the script for a different movie, The Bet, and not Okafor’s Law and
could therefore not sustain his application for copyright
infringement.
While also speaking on the ills of plagiarism and intellectual
property in Nigeria's movie industry, Idaha stated, “That is a
testament of corruption in the society— first, on the individual
level, and secondly on the structural level where people do not know
how to protect their work and producers do not know what they should
do to respect intellectual property.
“So there is first of all that ignorance in the system and then from
that ignorance a few people who exploit others. I don’t think there is
widespread such that everyone wants to exploit the other person, just
a few people who do not how to go about it. So it is up to the
artist/producers guilds to educate their members especially those ones
coming in now.
"An individual who comes in today as a fresher, in the next terms
years they will become an expert and a respected don. If you schooled
then when they came in, then obviously when they become experts they
will be able to respect the processes and the international laws that
apply to intellectual property.
“Piracy, on the other hand, is something the government will have to
do as pirates are just like mafias. Enforcement and Legislative laws
around piracy should be looked into to bring culprits to book.”