The Court of Cassation on Monday upheld the conviction of Culture Minister Gehan Zaki for infringing intellectual property rights in a final ruling that cannot be appealed.
The court also ordered her book, “Coco Chanel and Qout Al-Qulub”, to be withdrawn from the market after finding that it contained “unjustified verbatim quotations” from “The Lady of the Palace... The Assassination of Qout Al-Qulub al-Demerdashiyya”. It also ordered Zaki to pay 100,000 Egyptian pounds (around $2,000) in compensation to the book’s author, Sohair Abd El Hamid, a journalist at Al-Ahram.
The case sparked widespread debate when Zaki was appointed culture minister, succeeding Ahmed Hanno in February as part of a cabinet reshuffle in Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly’s second government, seven months after the Cairo Economic Court issued its ruling against her in July 2025.
In its written reasoning, the lower court said Zaki had “exceeded the legal limits of quotation” set out in the Intellectual Property Protection Law, finding that her actions caused Abd El Hamid “moral harm resulting from the infringement of her intellectual effort, as well as material damages including litigation costs and lost opportunities to profit from her original book, which retails for 130 pounds (about $2.60) per copy.”
Zaki appealed the ruling twice, arguing that the Intellectual Property Protection Law exempts analytical studies and excerpts used for criticism, discussion, or reporting, and that her book falls within those exceptions.
However, the Court of Cassation rejected both appeals and, in Monday’s ruling, upheld the order requiring the minister to pay 100,000 pounds to Abd El Hamid “as compensation for the material and moral damages resulting from the infringement of intellectual property rights and the unjustified quotation from one of her works”.
Abd El Hamid previously told Al Manassa that she discovered the issue after being invited to attend a seminar on Zaki’s book during the Cairo International Book Fair on Jan. 27, 2024. She said that after comparing the two works, she found entire passages and pages copied from her own book, along with chapter and section titles, and to archival material she had compiled through field research and investigative work despite the scarcity of reliable sources on the book’s subject.
Abd El Hamid said her publisher, Dar Risha, filed a complaint with the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO) in February 2024, accusing Zaki’s book of infringing the copyright of her 2022 work through “quotation, copying, and the appropriation of the author’s ideas and narrative imagination,” in violation of academic research standards.
In a previous Facebook post about the dispute, the journalist said she had received no response to the complaints she submitted to the organization, or to her verbal communications with its officials and personal messages sent to its chairman, Ahmed Bahi Al-Din.
She added that she had also filed a complaint against the organization as the book’s publisher, as well as against Zaki, with the office of former Culture Minister Neveen Elkilany, saying she was “fully confident that the complaint would receive her attention as the official responsible for Egyptian culture and for protecting all creators in Egypt.”
She also said at the time that she would send complaints to all relevant authorities because the issue “does not affect me personally alone, but every writer and creator in this country, which has always been, and will remain, the dawn of conscience.”
