EGYPT: Poverty, Police, and the Ballad of Intellectual Property

By Emad Mekay Reprint | | Print |

Emad Mekay

MEHALA EL-KOBRA, Egypt, Feb 19 2002 (IPS) - Egypt’s top pop singer uses song to enforce intellectual property rights these days. His muse? Multinational software corporations like Microsoft, Novell, and Symantec.

Shabaan Abdel Rahim has just released his new hit, “It’s Haram (Islamically prohibited) to sell or lend a pirated copy.”

“This software is owned by somebody else,” Rahim intones. “Keep it this way, or there will be police. Do not take someone else’s right or there will be an international organisation after you.”

In a country where the average yearly income is around 1,400 dollars and the average computer – sans software – costs 500 dollars, few people can fulfil their desire to connect to the outside world regardless of the obstacles of poverty and poor infrastructure.

Losses due to software piracy in Egypt amounted to 12.8 million dollars in 2001, about one-fifth of what Microsoft magnate Bill Gates makes in a day, according to Fortune magazine.

Rahim’s song, along with a series of cartoons, a film, an advertisement campaign, and educational programmes, is among the latest tools the international companies are using to combat software piracy in the Middle East’s most populous country and elsewhere in the region.

The companies are notorious here for the aggressiveness with which they push their products and defend their turf but this appears to be the first time they have invoked the Islamic “haram” and “halal” for what is forbidden and what is not.

Their mission is two-fold: change the culture and save money in the long run.

Driving the effort is the Business Software Alliance (BSA), whose members include leading computer makers and technology firms such as Apple Computer, Compaq, IBM, Intel, Intuit, and Sybase.

“We want to change the culture here,” says Ghada Khalifa, BSA Egypt representative. “We carry out a mission of training and awareness to end all forms of piracy and to protect intellectual property rights.”

Egypt, a country of 70 million people, figures highly in this drive not only because of its size but also because of its cultural prominence. Cairo has been dubbed the Hollywood of the Middle East.

BSA members also have enlisted the U.S. government in their campaign here. Egyptian officials say they often get an earful from U.S. counterparts over the protection of property rights. The officials here say they heed Washington’s words because of its political weight and its role as Egypt’s largest source of foreign aid, around two billion dollars per year.

So far, the result has been the closure of many computer offices and cyber cafes that otherwise would have continued to help Egypt’s poor and middle classes to access software and the Internet.

Hanem Kadouse, a 48-year-old housewife of average – meaning, very modest – means, recalls spending half a day trying to find a cyber cafe in order to chat with her daughter, who lives in the United States.

Kadouse can afford the occasional Internet phone conversation, which involves little more than the cost of a local call. Regular international telephone calls are simply beyond her means, however; not only are they far more expensive than a local call, but they also cost three times the rates that would apply were she calling Egypt from the United States.

“They were all closed,” she says of the local Internet cafes. “Nobody seemed to know when they’d open again.”

Unbeknownst to Kadouse, authorities here forced the closure of this town’s five computer sales and cyber cafes late last year. These businesses mainly were owned and run by entrepreneurs in their early twenties who tapped a vein of popular interest in information technology (IT) as a means of learning about the world and nurturing personal and commercial relationships and skills.

“In a country where the average computer machine prices are around 2,500 pounds (500 dollars) and nobody seems to be able to afford them, software overheads are an unnecessary extra expense,” says Mohammed Riad, IT manager at MRCO-Egypt, which shut down its branch here to pre-empt a police raid and a possible law suit.

“This is a poor country and this city is not any better off,” he says. “The slightest extra cost discourages consumers from buying computers in the first place, let alone software and access to the Internet or maintenance costs.”

Egypt had 12 computers for every 1,000 people in 1999, the latest year for which the World Bank has published data – one of the lowest rates anywhere. The Bank says the country’s annual per capita income stands at 1,400 dollars, compared to 2,000 for North Africa. Some 24 percent of Egyptians live below the national poverty line.

“There should be, at least, a period where we are allowed to achieve … a more solid market before we so aggressive implement copyrights laws,” says Sherif Mostapha, a computer specialist in Cairo. “Money coming from Egypt is nothing for those companies.”

Regardless, the BSA provides funding and training for hundreds of police officers to go after copyright violators throughout the Middle East and particularly in Egypt, according to Khalifa.

In addition, government bodies have sent private companies thousands of letters warning them not to use pirated software. Heavily armed police storm the offices of those who persist and their paramilitary raids are given headline treatment in the state- run press.

Egyptian lawmakers are now discussing increasing the existing penalties – including fines and prison terms – for software copyright offenders.

The BSA credits such tactics with pushing down the rate of piracy in Egypt from 75 percent of all software use in 1999, to 56 percent last year.

Meanwhile, Hanem Kadouse still cannot make an Internet phone call to her daughter in the United States.