Copying expired versions of software to avoid violating copyright

25-12-2016 | IslamWeb

Question:

Assalaamu alaykum. I am a fresh engineering graduate from Bangladesh. In this country, we face a very difficult problem in the academia. That is the problem of copyright. All of the engineering software used in this country's universities is pirated. This software is necessary for working in engineering. Some of them have open source alternatives, but most of them do not. Moreover, the open source alternatives are not very user-friendly. To make the matter worse, the universities themselves do not use any open source engineering software, nor do they let the students use them. As a result, students and teachers as well as the whole engineering industry use pirated software for their work in engineering. I always had some kind of ill feeling about this issue, but I know why people do this in developing countries. The basic reason is that the real version of the software is very costly. Not only for the students, but also for the universities! On top of that, the software licenses expire after one year! Still, by the grace of Allaah, I managed to buy real student versions of some engineering software with my own money. However, the software forces you to agree to the condition that you cannot use it for academic research! To avoid this issue, I applied a trick to use pirated software. For the software that I could not buy, I would download the older versions of the software, which are not in the market and of which the copyright dates have expired. For example, we are now in 2016, so I downloaded software from 2014; its copyright says 2014-2015. That means that its copyright terminated in 2015. Thus, I am not doing any damage to their business, nor am I breaking the copyright laws. Is this trick halal? And if not, then what should we do?

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Answer:

All perfect praise be to Allah, The Lord of the worlds. I testify that there is none worthy of worship except Allah and that Muhammad is His slave and Messenger. 

If the period of validity has expired, meaning that the software programs are no longer copyrighted by virtue of intellectual property right or that the owner has given permission for copying it in writing or that this is the customary practice, then there is nothing wrong with copying it in this case.

In order to know whether or not the copyright still exists and whether or not there is permission of either type [mentioned above], one can refer to the terms and conditions of use as well as ask the specialists in intellectual property copyright.

Allah knows best.