Egypt’s public performance rights debate has been building for two decades — streaming finally forced it into the open

📽️🎭 What brought the public performance rights debate back to the surface? After more than two decades gathering dust inside Egypt’s intellectual property law, public performance rights have emerged to dominate the conversation in Egypt’s film and drama industry — triggering an ideological and economic clash over how the creative production market should work. Artists’ unions are celebrating the development as a long-overdue historic victory for creators. Producers see it differently: imposing these financial obligations, they argue, is a direct threat to the sustainability of an industry already facing sharp production cost increases and structural financing problems.

Public performance rights 101

What does public performance mean? Public performance refers to any act that makes a creative work available to an audience — through performance, recitation, playing, or broadcasting — as defined by Article 138 of Egypt’s Intellectual Property Rights Protection Law. Attached to that performance is a right for the artist: financial compensation for the renewed commercial value of the work each time it is re-screened, re-broadcast, or made available to the public.

The right covers all exhibition formats — television, satellite channels, cinema screens, and digital platforms. The core dispute comes down to one fundamental point: under an initial contract, an artist receives a lump-sum fee for performing in a work and its first screening. The problem begins when that work continues generating revenue for exhibiting parties years after production, while the artist’s financial entitlement stops at the fee they received at the time of filming.

Old laws, new conversations

The debate took on sharper dimensions when actor and Senator Yasser Galal announced that the Senate had approved a proposal to activate public performance rights and refer recommendations to the government. Within days, head of Egypt’s Actors Syndicate Ashraf Zaki announced the start of actual implementation, grounding it in the provisions of the Intellectual Property Rights Protection Law — calling it a restoration and protection of the artist’s dignity and a historic achievement long overdue for all Egyptian creators and artists.

Despite the intensity of the argument, which might suggest Egypt is on the verge of new legislation, the reality is different. Public performance rights have had legislative protection for more than two decades. Article 155 gives performing artists a permanent right to attribution and protection from distortion or misrepresentation of their performance, while Article 156 grants them an exclusive financial right to exploit their performance through broadcasting, recording, copying, distribution, and rental. Financial protection extends for 50 years under Article 160.

What this confirms is that the core of the crisis was never about absent legislative text — it was about the failure to implement it in practice, due to the absence of enforcement mechanisms and a body responsible for collecting, managing, and distributing these rights.

… But why now? The explosive growth of the digital streaming market and encrypted platforms has brought this law back into focus. Drama and film productions no longer end their commercial life after a first or second television broadcast as they once did — they remain available for years on digital streaming platforms, with their rights continuously sold to new geographic markets, generating sustained revenues that the creators who made them never see.

The contracts problem

The unions’ push was met with resistance from producers. The Chamber of Cinema Industry held an emergency meeting attended by more than 50 producers, ending with a statement rejecting the unions’ demands as currently framed. The chamber’s position: the producer is the owner of a film and its exploitation rights, and current law does not require producers to sign standardized contracts that include public performance rights. Exhibitors — channels, cinemas, and platforms — are not legally obligated, it argues, to pay an additional fee each time a work is re-screened.

The chamber went further, with the head of the Arab Drama Authors Association, screenwriter Ayman Salama, accusing it of overstepping into matters outside its remit — adding that much of the dispute stems from a fundamental misunderstanding of what the right actually is, rather than a rejection of the principle itself.

Producers’ concerns center on existing lump-sum contracts under which artists waive financial exploitation rights in exchange for a pre-agreed fee. On that basis, producers argue that their objection is less about the public performance right itself and more about how activating it would interact with contracts already in place — specifically, whether it would affect revenues already earned under those agreements.

How are other countries handling public performance rights?

In the Arab World: Morocco is the only Arab country to have implemented a comprehensive public performance rights system through the Moroccan Copyright Office, which collects dues arising from the exploitation of works and performances and distributes them to rights holders. Egypt’s artists’ unions cite this experience as the closest Arab model for activating public performance rights.

Internationally: The French system doesn’t treat public performance rights as a contested issue — they apply automatically and cannot be negotiated away or excluded from contracts, Egyptian director and producer Essam Hayder, based in France, tells EnterpriseAM. The implementation mechanism is clearly spelled out in all contracts and included on a mandatory basis, with a minimum percentage defined, ensuring that writers and directors receive a share of a work’s revenues throughout its exhibition period — with the percentage varying by medium, whether theatrical release or broadcast rights sold to digital platforms.

The French model rests on a binding minimum wage for writers and directors calculated by hours worked, protecting them from unbalanced contracts and making public performance rights part of an integrated contractual system — not an obligation bolted onto a market that still lacks clear wage regulation, Hayder adds.

In Egypt, he argues, the first priority is restructuring the wage system and establishing a clear minimum wage for writers and directors — then the conversation about public performance rights percentages can follow. Successful implementation in Egypt doesn’t depend on legislative text alone; it requires broader reform of how the sector operates.

The missing infrastructure

Making the system work in Egypt requires establishing an independent collective management body to collect and distribute public performance rights dues, alongside building an accurate database covering all rights holders — actors, directors, writers, and composers — to ensure entitlements are calculated and distributed fairly. It also requires completing the legislative framework governing collection mechanisms and the operation of collective management societies.

“What we need is a trusted body that can be turned to if someone refuses to pay or tries to shortchange rights holders — with clear authority to take the necessary decisions,” Hayder tells us. He adds that the bigger challenge won’t be in cinema — which has relatively limited output — but in television drama, as the most prolific and widely distributed sector across channels and digital platforms, making it the primary arena where a public performance rights system will be tested.

Steps in the right direction: The Drama Writers Association has already successfully collected public performance rights dues from a number of Latin American countries and distributed the revenues to 22 Egyptian writers. It is also currently in contact with the World Intellectual Property Organization and several Arab and international collective management societies to draw on their expertise in managing these rights.