Copyright Notice and Open Publication License

The earlier Muslim jurists did not impose any copyright restrictions. It is not even clear whether they would
uphold intellectual property rights in the way they are understood and implemented today, although the Islamic
Fiqh Academy of the OIC and certain other institutions have ruled otherwise. If it comes to releasing material
free without any restrictions and having some system of acknowledging the sources, the latter should be
preferred in the interest of research and the promotion of knowledge. For example, many people believe that
Ibn Nujaym has done original work on his book called al-Ashbah wa-al-Naza'ir when all the time he was
transmitting from al-Suyuti. Al-Suyuti himself was transmitting from al-Subki, who was transmitting from
others till we reach al-Dabusi and before him al-Karkhi (with each later author making his own contribution,
of course). In short, leaving text totally free makes it difficult to trace the origin of an idea or principle. This
issue has been debated extensively and the idea here is not to participate in such a debate. The Institute is of
the opinion that in the interest of research, the Open Publication License might be a good idea and closer to
the Islamic form of intellectual property rights. The same goes for software in the context of the GPL (http://www.gnu.org). The entire material placed on this site has been prepared with Emacs, Tex/Latex
(Miktex, Pdftex, hyperref, pdfscreen, Arabtex), the Gimp and other wonderful programs associated with this
class of software. The contributions of the generous authors of these programs are gratefully acknowledged
by the Institute.

This copyright notice concerns the online versions of all the texts placed on this site in the Islamic Law
Infobase as well as the Islamic Banking Infobase. The copyright for each text placed in these two databases,
unless otherwise indicated on the text itself, belongs to the Advanced Legal Studies Institute, Islamabad. The
texts placed in these two Infobases are distributed under the Open Publication License guidelines described
at http://www.opencontent.org

The license does not apply to the texts placed in the Pakistan Law Infobase, because most of the documents
are either statutes or judgments of the courts. This is also true of a judgment or statute included in the Islamic
Law Infobase or the Islamic Banking Infobase. The license does apply to the Pakistan Law Infobase as well
when the copyright to a document is privately owned, as in the case of a commentary written on a statute or
when an annotated version is included in the Infobase.

The Advanced Legal Institute, while adhering to the Open Publication License, is constrained to place the
following additional, though temporary, restrictions because of some internal reasons:

1. The texts placed on this site may not be placed on any other site without the express
permission of the Advanced Legal Studies Institute or the copyright holder.

2. The texts may not be distributed on a CD-ROM or another electronic device without the
express permission of the Advanced Legal Studies Institute or the copyright holder.

As these additional restrictions may conflict with the spirit of the OpenPublication license, they will be removed
in the near future.

Advanced Legal Studies Institute
No. 103, Street 2, PTV Colony, Shahpur, Bhara Kahu
Islamabad, Pakistan