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Most contemporary scholars and fatwa bodies treat using pirated software as impermissible. The reasoning is that a developer's work is recognised property in Islamic law, and using it outside the terms they set takes benefit from their effort without the consent they made a condition of it. Two objections that people raise are worth answering rather than dismissing. Copying is not theft in the ordinary sense, because the original owner still has their copy - true, but the wrong being described is taking a benefit without the owner's permission, not depriving them of an object. And large corporations do not need the money - which may be so, but need is not what creates the right, and the argument would not be accepted about a wealthy shopkeeper. A genuine minority position exists among some scholars who question whether intellectual property is property at all in the classical sense. The practical answer for most people is that free, licensed alternatives now exist for almost everything, which makes the question largely avoidable.

Money that arrives by mistake is not yours, and the fact that someone else made the error does not transfer ownership. Islamic law treats property that comes into your hands without a valid basis as a trust you hold for its owner, and the Quranic instruction to render trusts to those they are due applies directly. So a bank crediting you twice, an employer overpaying your salary, a refund issued in error or a transfer sent to the wrong account all create an obligation to notify and return. Three things people ask about. Whether you must volunteer it or only return it if asked - most scholars say you must tell them, because staying silent while knowingly holding someone's property is concealment. What happens if the owner cannot be found after genuine effort - the established position is to give the amount away on their behalf. And whether a long delay changes anything - it does not; the obligation does not lapse with time, though how you settle it can be discussed if repaying at once would cause real hardship.

Ghostwriting is generally permissible. You are selling your labour and transferring the result to a client who then owns it, which is an ordinary service contract - and the practice is old, well established and openly acknowledged in publishing, speechwriting and corporate communications. Nobody is deceived when a chief executive's article is drafted by a communications team, because readers broadly understand how such pieces are produced. The question turns on whether anyone is misled about something that actually matters to them. Two situations cross that line clearly. Academic work submitted as a student's own defeats the purpose of an assessment and deceives an institution that is certifying competence. And professional output where a qualification is being relied on - a legal opinion, a medical article, an engineering report - misrepresents whose expertise stands behind it, which is exactly what the reader is relying on. Everything else sits between, and the useful test is whether the reader would feel deceived if they knew.

Most presales fail on uncertainty before any question about the token arises. You pay today for something that does not yet exist, with no specification you could enforce, no delivery date you could rely on, and no obligation on anyone to build what was described. Islamic contract law requires that the object of an exchange be defined - and a whitepaper describing intentions is not a specification. There is a genuine exception in Islamic law for paying in advance for goods not yet in existence, called salam, but its conditions are strict precisely to control this risk: the goods must be specified by measurable attributes, the delivery date fixed, and the price paid in full at contracting. A token whose eventual function depends on whether a team delivers does not meet the specification requirement. Beyond the contract, the empirical record matters: a large majority of ICOs have failed or turned out to be fraudulent, which is context rather than a ruling but is not irrelevant.

Delegating investment decisions is not the problem. Appointing an agent to act on your behalf is a recognised contract, and a robo-advisor is a fund manager with software instead of a person - the automation changes who executes, not what is permitted. What decides it is what the algorithm actually buys. Almost every mainstream robo-advisor builds portfolios around bond allocations for stability, holds broad market index funds containing conventional banks, insurers, alcohol and gambling companies, and rebalances into interest-bearing instruments as you approach your target date. A default portfolio at a conventional provider will fail screening on the bond allocation alone. Dedicated Shariah-compliant robo-advisors exist and screen continuously with supervisory oversight, and some mainstream platforms now offer a compliant portfolio option. The practical step is to look at the actual holdings rather than the marketing, because an ethical or ESG label is not the same screen and excludes different things.

It depends on what the deposit is doing. Where a customer cancels and you have genuinely incurred cost - materials bought, time spent, a slot held that you could not fill - keeping the amount that covers that loss is compensation, and most scholars permit it. Keeping the entire deposit regardless of what you actually lost is a penalty rather than compensation, and scholars are much more cautious about that, because you would be taking wealth beyond any harm suffered. There is a recognised classical arrangement close to this: arbun, an earnest payment where the buyer may withdraw and the seller keeps the deposit, which the Hanbali school permits explicitly and AAOIFI has adopted for Islamic finance. The practical resolution most scholars point to is to size the deposit to the real cost of a cancellation, state clearly at booking what happens if the customer cancels and when, and return anything above your actual loss.