For over a century, intellectual property (IP) regimes have been justified using Western philosophical theories rooted in the idea that IP must reward talent and maximize global stocks of knowledge and cultural products. Reframing IP in a context of legal pluralism, Ezieddin Elmahjub brings an Islamic and comparative narrative to the appropriate design and scope of IP rights, and in doing so criticizes the dominance of Western influence on a global regime that impacts the ability of people to access medicine, to read, to imagine, and to reshape popular culture. The Islamic vision of IP, which is based on a broad theory of social justice, maintains that IP cannot simply be seen as a reward for effort or tool to maximize economic efficiency but as one legal right within a complicated distributive scheme affecting fundamental human rights, equal opportunities, and human capabilities.

This comprehensive Research Handbook examines moral rights since their establishment in the 19th century and considers the roles they play in the 21st century in relation to the technological environment in which copyright exists. Drawing together rich perspectives on intellectual property law around the world, this Research Handbook provides new insights on the traditional issues of moral rights and analyses more recent challenges in copyright law, patent law, and trademark law.

This study highlights the agency of African economic actors in the green tea trade between China and West Africa, their unique tea brand designs, their challenges and successes, and the social and cultural context in which they conduct their work.

Until now, the definition of property in international law has been poorly addressed. It is assumed that international law possesses sufficient content to regulate property, that provisions in international instruments addressing property rights are shown to act, and that resolutions of property disputes are claimed to be in accordance with international law. Yet, when asked to define key attributes of property in international law are, the legal world draws a collective blank. New Property in International Law examines how international law consistently falls short when it comes to new property regulation, because key stakeholders have failed to define what property is. The book considers and categorises new property into three areas; cultural property, common property, and contingent property, aiming to carve out, update, and impart coherence to international property law. By sketching the contours of new property in international law through a rigorous analytical comparison of property concepts in the Western, Soviet, post-Soviet, Chinese and Islamic juristic traditions, this work enables a balanced distillation of core attributes of new property from diverse property concepts that can then be woven into a broadly acceptable and broadly applicable definition.

A contest is afoot in Muslim discourses around the world in the twenty-first century. Prevalent norms and acts are subject to competing motivations, trends and forces. The image of a monolithic Islam is thus wholly inadequate to identify and interpret the different expressions of Muslim thought and practice in their specific yet connected contexts. This book proposes competing and persuasive perspectives for interpreting what Muslims say, do and think in collective settings or in the light of common frames of reference. The chapters contained in this book reflect a diversity of disciplines and interests. Nonetheless, a common thread of the preoccupation with meanings in context unites the contributors and the approaches to their chosen examples. Islam is not a discrete category that is taken for granted. Instead, the cacophony of voices in the Muslim world situated in specific contexts, variously national, regional or global, is allowed to inform each chapter. Here one encounters contemporary Muslims participating in discourses with a contested character that create opportunities to augment or question orthodox dictates or transmit or alter existing beliefs and practices. What emerges are nuanced portraits of contemporary Muslim thought and practice that reveal a far from monolithic Islam to which all things Islamic can be reduced.

The Muslim leader best known for his contributions to the establishment of an interfaith community center near Manhattan's Ground Zero offers insight into his progressive beliefs and advocacy of tolerance and equal rights.

In this original and illuminating book, Denise A. Spellberg reveals a little-known but crucial dimension of the story of American religious freedom—a drama in which Islam played a surprising role. In 1765, eleven years before composing the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson bought a Qur’an. This marked only the beginning of his lifelong interest in Islam, and he would go on to acquire numerous books on Middle Eastern languages, history, and travel, taking extensive notes on Islam as it relates to English common law. Jefferson sought to understand Islam notwithstanding his personal disdain for the faith, a sentiment prevalent among his Protestant contemporaries in England and America. But unlike most of them, by 1776 Jefferson could imagine Muslims as future citizens of his new country. Based on groundbreaking research, Spellberg compellingly recounts how a handful of the Founders, Jefferson foremost among them, drew upon Enlightenment ideas about the toleration of Muslims (then deemed the ultimate outsiders in Western society) to fashion out of what had been a purely speculative debate a practical foundation for governance in America. In this way, Muslims, who were not even known to exist in the colonies, became the imaginary outer limit for an unprecedented, uniquely American religious pluralism that would also encompass the actual despised minorities of Jews and Catholics. The rancorous public dispute concerning the inclusion of Muslims, for which principle Jefferson’s political foes would vilify him to the end of his life, thus became decisive in the Founders’ ultimate judgment not to establish a Protestant nation, as they might well have done. As popular suspicions about Islam persist and the numbers of American Muslim citizenry grow into the millions, Spellberg’s revelatory understanding of this radical notion of the Founders is more urgent than ever. Thomas Jefferson’s Qur’an is a timely look at the ideals that existed at our country’s creation, and their fundamental implications for our present and future.