Exploring the Islamic model of legitimacy and law compliance as a tool against digital piracy

Abstract

Digital piracy, concerning the law, is viewed as illegal, though this is not the case, according to the social contexts. A large part of scientific research addressed this issue by studying the human behaviour to explore the motives and determinants of the act of piracy to grapple with through appropriate legal means. The other part of research focused on the reasons that hold people back from observing the law and, hence, fail to comply with its principles.The main premise of these literature is that the legal orientations or domains of legal socialization, such as legitimacy and legal cynicism, influence compliance with the law and criminal offending. Moreover, prior findings indicated that Muslim societies manifest a high level of religious loyalty compared to other world religious groups which is reflexively expressed into their adherence to Shari'ah rules (Islamic Law).Thereby, can be used as an informal mechanism to fight digital piracy. Nevertheless, there is a dearth of in depth examination of that phenomenon and how it affects positively Muslims' legal orientation. This paper addresses these issues from a psychological jurisprudence perspective to elucidate the underlying factors and their through interactions. The results show that the practice of Islam as a life style whereby beliefs, rituals, along with all aspects of real life are enveloped in wholeness as devotions, dynamically fuel the process of loyalty and positively impacts Muslims' legal orientation.As such, this paper presents an inclusive religious loyalty-based model of legal socialization, law compliance and self-abiding society for Muslim countries. The model integrates procedural justice theory with the Islamic view of faith (Iman) and loyalty (Al-Wala'a) as deduced from Al-Qur'an and Sunnah to describe all the motivations influencing the Muslims' decisions to comply or not with a given law.