Egypt's Radio & Television Union Signs Copyright Agreement with Google

Ah the days of dodgy video streaming and watching films on YouTube uploaded by complete rando’s— good times. Just kidding, we don’t approve of illegal tings. But in all seriousness, it took a hot minute for proper copyrights to take precedent in the virtual world, and even longer for Egyptian production companies to figure it out. Egyptian state television, though, seems to have gone straight to the source.

In a new agreement with Google, the Egyptian Radio and Television Union (aka ERTU, aka Maspero) has made it that anyone who publishes content owned by the national networks will not receive funds from YouTube. Instead, all that money - an estimated USD100,000 to USD120,000 monthly - will be funnelled towards the union.

So far, the union has been able to recover 1,100 out of the 2,700 films that were leaked to the internet, which includes works by Abdel Halim Hafez, Mohamed Abdelwahab, Laila Mourad and Ismail Yassin. The ERTU is the oldest state-run broadcasting company in all of Africa and the Arab world, running since 1960 - so there’s a lot to catch up on.