Can I make use of this course I didn't pay for?

Dear Hadi,

Dear Reader,

Thank you for your question.  It seems to us there are really two separate questions here: 1) How the course was obtained, and 2) What you subsequently do with the knowledge you learned from it.

If the course was legitimately given to you for free by its owner - for example, the instructor offered a free scholarship, gave you a complimentary copy, or explicitly permitted you to access it - then there is no problem in learning from it. Likewise, teaching beneficial knowledge to others is generally something Islam encourages.

But if the course was normally supposed to be paid for and you obtained access through a means that the owner did not authorize - for example, someone shared a private login with you, gave you files that were not meant to be shared, or you bypassed the payment or access restrictions - then the first issue is that you should not have taken advantage of that access in the first place.

Allah says:  “O you who believe, do not consume one another’s wealth unjustly, but only [in lawful] business by mutual consent.”
(Qur'an 4:29)

And the Prophet (pbuh) said:  “The property of a Muslim is not lawful except with his willing consent.” (Musnad Ahmad and others)

The general Islamic principle is that a person's property and rights are not to be taken or used without their consent. In contemporary circumstances, this can include intellectual property and paid educational content, particularly where the creator has deliberately placed it behind a paywall and has not given permission for others to access it for free.

So if you know that you obtained the course in a way the creator did not permit, I would not advise simply saying, “I have it now, so I might as well use it.”  Rather, the safer and more conscientious course would be to repent for obtaining it improperly and make a genuine effort to rectify the matter.

If possible, contact the creator and pay for the course. If you cannot identify the creator or cannot reasonably make contact, you should ask a knowledgeable scholar about the appropriate way to discharge whatever financial obligation may remain. The important point is not merely to feel guilty, but to make a sincere effort to put the matter right.

The next part of your situation involves your desire to teach the knowledge you have obtained.  This is where an important distinction should be made.

Knowledge itself is not necessarily something that becomes forbidden to teach simply because you learned it from a particular course. If you have genuinely understood the underlying skills or concepts and can explain them independently, without reproducing the instructor's videos, written materials, slides, exercises, or other protected content, then teaching those concepts can be a different matter from copying and redistributing the course.

Therefore, if someone has learned useful skills and wants to teach poor students who cannot afford the original course for free, there is a strong charitable dimension to that intention.

However, the good intention does not make the original wrongful access permissible. Two things can be true at the same time: the desire to benefit others may be praiseworthy, while the way the knowledge was initially obtained was wrong.

For that reason, I would recommend first trying to resolve the original problem - ideally by going back and purchasing the course or otherwise obtaining the creator's permission. Once that has been done, teaching the underlying knowledge to others in one's own words is much easier to justify.

Now, when it comes to you wanting to charge money for your own course, this is where we would advise being considerably more cautious.

If the knowledge was acquired through an unauthorized copy or unauthorized access to someone else's paid course, we would not recommend turning around and selling a competing course based on what you obtained that way. 

Even if you are not literally copying the videos or PDFs, there is a significant ethical difference between saying, “I learned something useful and want to teach it to people who cannot afford it,” and saying, “I obtained someone's paid course without paying for it, and now I am going to monetize what I learned from it.”

The second situation creates a much greater concern about benefiting financially from something you had no right to obtain in the first place.

Moreover, if your proposed paid course substantially reproduces the structure, distinctive material, examples, exercises, or other creative content of the original, the concern becomes even stronger. Simply changing the wording does not necessarily make copying permissible.

Allah says: “Indeed, Allah commands you to render trusts to whom they are due.” (Qur'an 4:58)

And the Prophet (pbuh) said:  “Whoever deceives us is not one of us.”  (Sahih Muslim)

The exact application of these principles to modern copyright and intellectual-property questions can involve scholarly differences, so a person dealing with a particular case should also consider the terms of the course and seek a qualified scholar's advice. But where the facts are as described - the course was supposed to be paid for, you knew that and you obtained access without the creator's permission, the more cautious Islamic answer is not to profit from that unauthorized access.

If, in fact, there was unauthorized access to the material, here is a summary of what we would suggest, and God knows best:  

1. Acknowledge that obtaining the course improperly was not right.
2. Try to go back and pay for it, even if you have already learned everything from it. 
3. Once you have legitimately resolved the matter, teach the underlying knowledge in your own words, without copying or redistributing the original course materials.
4. If you want to help people who cannot afford the course, teaching them for free can be a particularly good use of the knowledge, provided doing so does not violate the creator's explicit rights or terms.
5. If you eventually want to create a paid course, make it genuinely your own work and, where there is any substantial use of the original creator's distinctive material or intellectual property, obtain their permission or otherwise ensure that what you are doing is Islamically and legally permissible.

In peace.