❊ The Fairouz Lawsuit. It’s All About Splitting A Pie

I was reading that people wanted to demonstrate against “preventing Fairouz from singing” and it sounded like a really serious issue. Who on earth would dare to stop me from listening to my favorite Lebanese diva? But then I read more about the matter (Arabic).

There’s a lot of smoke in the air and emotions are understandably high (Fairouz is the queen of emotions). People are instinctively taking Fairouz’s side and looking at the matter as one of evil gold digging relatives trying to swindle Fairouz and preventing her from singing.

It’s not like that. The lawsuit is complex and deals with intricate matters of intellectual property rights and inheritance rights, but I’ll try to explain it in a simple way by asking you a question: “If Fairouz performed in a play that was created by Mansour and Assi Rahbani, and made a lot of money in the process, should she share some of that money with the people who hold a part of the intellectual property rights?”

The Lebanese law says that to perform a play, you have to have the written permission of ALL those who hold the copy rights to that play, regardless of whether or not they have inherited those rights. In other words, the law is on the side of the unpopular plaintiffs.

My advice to Fairouz is: Don’t be greedy, share some of the money and settle this among yourselves as a family. This way we’ll all benefit.

— 
Note: Posts with titles starting with an ❊ (asterisk) are my opinion posts. I used this system to separate long posts from quick links and comments.