A few days ago, a friend emailed me to relay a few snippets of dialogue and some storylines from a popular television comedy. “Isn’t this your material?” he asked.
It was my material. Not entirely verbatim, of course. It was cribbed from a television series I wrote a few years ago, but the similarity was unmistakable. My friend had the standard Hollywood advice.
“You should sue them,” he said. My friend, I don’t need to point out, is a lawyer who specialises in litigation.
“For what?” I asked. “Whoever wrote that script probably doesn’t even remember seeing my show all those years ago. It’s just something that was lodged in his memory. My show was cancelled after 10 episodes. His show is a giant hit.”
My attitude about this kind of plagiarism is philosophical. In the giant mill of Hollywood – where scripts and stories and songs and ideas get tossed around constantly – it’s impossible to keep track of who came up with what first.
For instance, it’s highly unlikely that Jay Z and Abdel Halim Hafez, Egyptian movie star and singer from the 1950s, have many things in common. Their lives and work don’t seem to have intersected at all. Jay Z was born in 1969. Hafez died in 1977. Jay Z specialises in profane and sexually explicit rap lyrics. Hafez sang popular Egyptian love songs and ballads, many with roots deep in Arab folk culture.
And yet, a California judge has ruled that Jay Z’s breakout hit, Big Pimpin’, is close enough to one of Hafez’s most famous songs, Khosara Khosara, to justify a full legal proceeding. The heirs of the composer of Khosara Khosara, Baligh Hamdy, are pressing on with a lawsuit. The issue here is the process known as “sampling” – in which fragments of recorded songs and melodic hooks are isolated and repurposed, mostly without compensation, in other works.
Most people call this “stealing”, of course. But in the contemporary music business, where nearly every recorded song has been digitised and catalogued and is available at the click of a mouse, producers and stars prefer to use a more genteel word. They “sample” other people’s work. They “refresh” it and deliver it to a “younger and hipper” audience.
Stealing – or maybe it’s nicer to say “borrowing without attribution” – seems to be happening a lot in the music business. The pop star Sam Smith was forced to share the royalties of his hit 2014 song Stay With Me with ageing rock star Tom Petty, whose 1989 song I Won’t Back Down sounds a whole lot like it. The two recording stars never went to court – they settled the issue in the typical Hollywood way, by hiring teams of lawyers to wrangle and haggle with each other in a conference room somewhere – but that’s probably because the two songs sound so much alike it really wasn’t worth disputing the fact.
That was probably a wise move. When Robin Thicke and his co-writer Pharrell Williams were sued by the estate of the late R&B star Marvin Gaye – they were accused by the estate of lifting large portions of Gaye’s song, Got to Give it Up, and using them in their 2014 smash hit, Blurred Lines – they insisted that the dispute go to trial. A jury listened to both songs and decided that, yes, Thicke and Pharrell ripped off the tune and owed the Gaye estate millions.
Smith, Thicke, and Williams all insist that any similarities between their hits and the earlier songs are – if they even exist – utterly coincidental and the product of some kind of subconscious memory at work. They’ve all heard so many songs and so many melodies that it’s understandable that some of their new stuff is going to come out sounding a lot like someone else’s old stuff.
Jay Z and his producer, Timbaland, don’t dispute that they “sampled” the song. It’s immediately obvious to anyone – the signature hook of Khosara Khosara as it was recorded by Abdel Halim Hafez is repeated throughout Big Pimpin’. What they dispute, though, is that they have anything to apologise for or anyone to compensate.
It’s an odd sort of defence. Music producers who “sample” other people’s material seem to suggest that it’s more honorable to take a piece of recorded music – the work product of composers, singers, sound engineers and musicians – and plop it down in something new than it is for, say, Sam Smith to hear a Tom Petty tune years ago and then sit down a decade later and write something similar by mistake.
I take the opposite view. “Sampling”, to me anyway, seems like outright and brazen theft. What the other three musicians are accused of seems closer to a kind of thoughtless laziness. And I should be the last person on Earth to condemn anyone else for laziness.
“And that’s why I won’t sue,” I told my lawyer friend. “That show borrowed my material, but at least they didn’t sample it.”
My lawyer friend was disappointed. He was itching, I guess, for a juicy lawsuit. But he’s in the wrong area of the entertainment business. Comedy writers don’t sample.
Rob Long is a writer and producer based in Hollywood
On Twitter: @rcbl
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Formula Middle East Calendar (Formula Regional and Formula 4)
Round 1: January 17-19, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 2: January 22-23, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 3: February 7-9, Dubai Autodrome – Dubai
Round 4: February 14-16, Yas Marina Circuit – Abu Dhabi
Round 5: February 25-27, Jeddah Corniche Circuit – Saudi Arabia
The National's picks
4.35pm: Tilal Al Khalediah
5.10pm: Continous
5.45pm: Raging Torrent
6.20pm: West Acre
7pm: Flood Zone
7.40pm: Straight No Chaser
8.15pm: Romantic Warrior
8.50pm: Calandogan
9.30pm: Forever Young
Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
Indoor cricket in a nutshell
Indoor Cricket World Cup – Sep 16-20, Insportz, Dubai
16 Indoor cricket matches are 16 overs per side
8 There are eight players per team
9 There have been nine Indoor Cricket World Cups for men. Australia have won every one.
5 Five runs are deducted from the score when a wickets falls
4 Batsmen bat in pairs, facing four overs per partnership
Scoring In indoor cricket, runs are scored by way of both physical and bonus runs. Physical runs are scored by both batsmen completing a run from one crease to the other. Bonus runs are scored when the ball hits a net in different zones, but only when at least one physical run is score.
Zones
A Front net, behind the striker and wicketkeeper: 0 runs
B Side nets, between the striker and halfway down the pitch: 1 run
C Side nets between halfway and the bowlers end: 2 runs
D Back net: 4 runs on the bounce, 6 runs on the full
COMPANY PROFILE
Name: Kumulus Water
Started: 2021
Founders: Iheb Triki and Mohamed Ali Abid
Based: Tunisia
Sector: Water technology
Number of staff: 22
Investment raised: $4 million
A MINECRAFT MOVIE
Director: Jared Hess
Starring: Jack Black, Jennifer Coolidge, Jason Momoa
Rating: 3/5
2025 Fifa Club World Cup groups
Group A: Palmeiras, Porto, Al Ahly, Inter Miami.
Group B: Paris Saint-Germain, Atletico Madrid, Botafogo, Seattle.
Group C: Bayern Munich, Auckland City, Boca Juniors, Benfica.
Group D: Flamengo, ES Tunis, Chelsea, (Leon banned).
Group E: River Plate, Urawa, Monterrey, Inter Milan.
Group F: Fluminense, Borussia Dortmund, Ulsan, Mamelodi Sundowns.
Group G: Manchester City, Wydad, Al Ain, Juventus.
Group H: Real Madrid, Al Hilal, Pachuca, Salzburg.
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