Calling Tarek Nour a copy-cat gets you arrested in Egypt.

Looks like I'll never set foot in Egypt again, as I did say Tareknour.tv copies pretty much everyone when I badlanded their series of rip-off films after a tip from Marketing 3.0 There was even a facebook group started in the rip-off artists honor, where it almost became an informal contest in finding originals for each film on Tareknour.tv - new pairings were added daily. The Daily News Egypt reports Student Tamer Azab remains in police custody for allegedly defaming advertising mogul Tarek Nour.

Azab, a student at Misr University for Science and Technology (MUST), was arrested on Oct. 25 for creating a Facebook group accusing Nour of plagiarizing other commercials in promos for his TV channel Al-Qahera Wal Nas (Cairo Centric). On the online group “Stolen Promos,” Azab claims that the promos for the channel were exact Arabic replicas of other international commercials, adding hyperlinks to the copied commercials. “When he created this group he started receiving email threats from anonymous sources,” his brother, Maher Azab, told Daily News Egypt. Last August, a legal representative of the channel filed an legal warning in which he accused Azab of defamation and libel against Nour, as well as violating the channel’s intellectual property rights. According to his brother, Azab is not doing well. “He is eligible for release and yet they are still holding him…there is no legal justification for detaining him any longer,” he said.

A twitter-pal ( I'm not so sure I should mention his name) tells me that Azab has been released from prison now, after spending a day and a half in a holding cell. He also informs me that Tarek Nour is member of the ruling party and has both money & connections. In short, don't mess with the master copy-cat TV channel unless you want to get arrested in Egypt.
Wouldn't it be easier just to use that money and hire some real creatives who can write their own scripts?

Here's a tip for the Egyptian Police to ponder: Infringing intellectual property is a crime too, so why aren't you guys looking into that? The only thing Egypt doesn't recognize in the Berne convention is Israel - that's paragraph 1 article 33.
You arrested the wrong guy. I feel like ending this with one of those faboo "Come to Egypt" ads. Nothing compares to Egypt indeed. The Sun shines so bright you won't see the corruption.

Egypt - Come to Egypt / The sun treasure - (2009) :45 (Egypt)

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