IP Law Daily, COPYRIGHT—11th Cir.: Arabian rights? DISH Network prevails in claim over Arabic-language TV series, (Apr 10, 2026)

By Matthew Hersh, J.D.

Ownership under American and Emirati copyright laws required close analysis.

A federal district court in Florida correctly found that DISH Network obtained the rights to transmit a series of Arabic-language television shows in the United States, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit has held. The court, in a sweeping analysis of copyright ownership issues arising under the laws of both the United States and the United Arab Emirates, also concluded that the original producer of the shows—as opposed to the screenwriters and other individuals who contributed to their production—obtained the rights to those shows at the moment of their creation (Dish Network L.L.C. v. Fraifer, No. 24-10223 (11th Cir. Apr. 9, 2026)).

The lawsuit involves three broadcasters serving the Arabic-speaking community. MBC Group is a media and broadcasting organization located in the United Arab Emirates. It owns the rights to four Arabic-language television series (among them, the popular Chef Hassan cooking show). DISH Network is a television provider that airs Arabic-language channels in the United States. It claims to hold the exclusive right to air those four MBC shows in the United States. Finally, there is a pair of companies named Tele-Center and Planet Telecom. Those two companies, commonly owned by an individual named Gaby Fraifer, offer—at least they used to offer, until they went out of business—Arabic-language television programing through websites and set-top boxes.

In August 2016, DISH sued the Fraifer-owned defendants (and Fraifer himself) for copyright infringement. According to DISH, these companies captured live broadcasts of MBC broadcasts—including broadcasts of the four shows at issue here—and retransmitted them without authorization to viewers in the United States. DISH prevailed at a bench trial and was awarded a permanent injunction and $600,000 in statutory damages, attorney fees, and costs.

The defendant companies and their owner appealed, leading to this opinion.

Ownership. The court affirmed the judgment in favor of DISH. The first question was whether DISH owned the U.S. rights to the four series at issue in the lawsuit. That involved three distinct questions. First, did MBC initially own the rights to the series at the time they were created? Second, was MBC’s U.S. registration of those series valid? Third, did DISH actually acquire the rights to those series from MBC? The district court found that the answers to these questions was “yes”—and the court of appeals agreed.

MBC initially owned the works in question at the time they were filmed, the court found, because it directed the creation of the shows. Under UAE copyright law, an audiovisual work can fall into two categories. If a work can be separated into components attributable to distinct contributors—the screenwriter, music producer, director, and so on—then it is called a “Joint Work” and ownership is split among those contributors. But the contribution of authors is “assimilated into the public goal... in such a way that separation and distinction of each author’s contribution becomes impossible,” UAE law provides, then the end product is labeled a “Collective Work” and the director essentially takes all.

The works fell more neatly into the latter provision, the court found. The defendants argued that the shows were joint works because each contributor was specifically identified, along with their titles, in the opening and closing credits of the shows. But that did not establish, the court found, “that each individual’s contributions can be separated or distinguished.” Critically, the court noted, the authors who participated in creating the series “performed overlapping roles, making it impossible to distinguish each author’s contributions.” Moreover, the court noted, the defendants’ argument proved too much. Indeed, if credits were determinative of ownership, the court found, that would essentially “broaden the definition of a ‘Joint Work’ to encompass all audio-visual works.” That was clearly not the intent of UAE copyright law, the court found.

The court next turned to the question of whether MBC validly registered the four series in the United States. This question it dispatched with ease. The defendants argued that MBC identified the television series in their registration applications as works for hire—a concept that does not exist in UAE law. But they had a problem, the court found: this should have been raised in their answer as an affirmative defense. To be sure, the court noted, the defendants belatedly moved to amend their answer to include this affirmative defense—but by that time discovery had closed and motions for summary judgment had already been filed. The defense was therefore waived.

Finally, the court found, there was no basis to dispute MBC’s transfer of ownership to DISH. The defendants raised several arguments in support of this contention, among them an argument that the transfer did not satisfy the signed writing requirement of 17 U.S.C. 204(a). But none of these arguments were even worth analyzing, the court found, because the defendants simply did not have standing to challenge the transfer at all. The main purpose of the writing requirement, the court noted, was to resolve disputes between copyright owners and transferees and to “protect copyright holders from persons mistakenly or fraudulently claiming copyright ownership.” But here, the court noted, MBC and DISH both agreed there had been a valid transfer. There was no reason to allow a third party to challenge the validity of an otherwise undisputed copyright transfer, the court noted—and indeed it would create a “perverse incentive” for copyright infringers to do so. The challenge to ownership would fail.

Copyright infringement. With ownership out of the way, the court of appeals also affirmed the judgment of copyright infringement. Here the issue involved evidentiary rules rather than copyright law. DISH tendered expert evidence as well as various documents—among them, PayPal and WHOIS records—to show that the defendants captured the broadcasts at issue and “encoded” them into formats suitable for internet streaming. The defendants challenged this evidence on a number of evidentiary grounds, including the qualifications of DISH’s expert and the admissibility and relevance of the records at issue. But the district court “did not clearly err in finding that the defendants operated the encoders,” the court found. The judgment of infringement would therefore stand.

The Case is No. 24-10223.

Judge: Kidd, E.

Attorneys: Timothy Frank (Hagan Noll & Boyle, LLC) for Dish Network L.L.C. Dineen Pashoukos Wasylik (DPW Legal) for Gaby Fraifer.

Companies: Dish Network L.L.C.

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