Walid Abou Farhat is a partner at Abou Farhat Law Offices – Lebanon.
He has been connected for the past 10 years with various copyright and telecommunication deals. He has been involved in GSM business in Africa on behalf of Hits Telecom and in Mobile TV deals with 3G3M, a Norwegian investment group. In 2003 he actively participated in the creation of the first music publishing company in Lebanon “OMP”. In 2007 he acted as senior Legal advisor to O-Media of Egypt and actively participated in discussions pertaining to a joint-venture with Warner Group. He has legally assisted Melody Group , Rotana Audiovisual & other key media players in the Middle East & North Africa. Currently he is retained by telecom Aggregators as ARPU+ (Egypt), Qanawat (United Arab Emirates), Digi Music (Lebanon) and Believe & Yala Music (France). He also acts on behalf of many authors’ right holders, artists and labels such as Alam El Pham (Egypt) Arabica Music & Music is My Life (Lebanon) and EMI Music Arabia (UAE).
He represents other important publishers whether in the music or literature fields and has been actively involved in workshops with the Copyright Unit at Arab League and WIPO and has conducted several presentations related to collective management and copyright enforcement. He is also actively involved with SACEM, PRS and ADAMI to establish efficient collective management in the Arabic world.
Further practices of Abou Farhat Law Offices include negotiations between performers and sites, aggregator licensing deals, live events , digital artist management and sponsorship deals. The law offices have been involved in much litigation as the Lebanese judicial system is very active and the Lebanese copyright law is very efficient. Abou Farhat Law Offices works in partnership with Kilani law firm in Jordan and Ali Habib law firm in the United Arab Emirates.
Appointed as Copyright expert before the USA Central District Court in California in the Osama Ahmed Fahmy v.Jay-Z,el Al – Case Reference:2:07-cv-05715-CAS(PJWx).
