Crime and the Internet

This is a collection of academic conference papers dealing with the most urgent forms of criminal activity on the Internet today. You will be familiar with most of the topics - hacking, copyright infringements, censorship and pornography, and good old theft. What's new about the approach is that these studies are written by academic criminologists.

The collection begins with a couple of overview articles, outlining the problems of dealing with crime in a medium for which laws have not yet been properly framed. Most of the authors seem to be swirling around amongst a great deal of uncertainty. How to define computer crime? How to establish reliable statistics? How to identify malefactors? There are many aspects of electronic media which change so fast, it is hard for law to keep up.



They include discussions of fraud, piracy, counterfeit, obscenity, and stalking - though I was surprised they didn't include the sort of malicious behaviour which includes the distribution of viruses. These acts of vandalism must cost enormous amounts to many of us in terms of lost time and corrupted data.

There is a well-informed article on hackers by Paul Taylor - but it has very little to do with law. Bela Chatterjee makes a better shot at this in her chapter on pornography - but she falls into the opposite trap. Her discussion of defining the issues goes on so long, the topic never leaves the ground.

Marjorie Heims does much better in keeping the two topics balanced and alive in her chapter on freedom of online speech in the USA.

Yaman Akdeniz wrestles purposefully with the problems of defining 'illegal and harmful content' in the UK, bounded as it is by European law. His conclusions are that multi-layered regulation and 'a lightness of touch' are most likely to be effective.

There are also chapters on cyber stalking, the language of cyber crime, and an interesting closer which considers the possibilities of putting the criminal courts on line.

Most of the studies are written in a very leisurely manner - quite unlike the medium they are discussing. It's a style of old-fashioned belles lettres which I suspect may soon be pushed out of favour by people's need for compressed, succinct information. But the articles are produced by legal theorists, for whom the need to examine thorny issues of jurisprudence at length takes precedence over the habits of the Net.

Each chapter has its own bibliography of further reading, and when I checked they're as up to date as it's possible to be. This collection will be of interest to sociologists of the Internet, to media studies people, and to anyone who wants to consider the legal issues of digital crimes in a serious and scholarly manner.