Diamond Graduate School of Law

LL.M. Program

Syllabus for Cyber Crime and Techno-Torts

Cyber Crime and Techno-Torts (3cr. Spring Only): A library patron is attempting to get information on trade embargos and a popup advertisement offering adult content appears on the screen. Why do they do that? Is it free speech or is it pornography?  Obscenity and Speech questions come to the front of peoples mind when talking of electronic crime.  But, computer crime is much more than the unpleasantness of offensive advertising.  Fraud and intellectual property crimes cost e-commerce substantial amounts in lost profits.  The common activities of young hackers creating and launching viruses over e-mail connections pale when compared to the committed cyber terrorist, or the damage caused when identity theft results in the lose of your home.  How can we drag these miscreants into the courts to pay for their mis deeds?  Questions about what is the correct method of gathering and reserving evidence of criminal activity take the lead only after the alleged criminal is identified.  Students in this course will deal with the concepts of the nature of computer crime and the att empts of producers to prevent hacking of their products. The gathering and preservation of electronic evidence will be covered (not necessarily in the Enron context).

Students will deal with the liability of Web Site Owners and ISPs when criminals post to their service.
And finally, the subject of “adult content” will be covered with special emphasis on the Child Online
Protection Act and other legislative actions.

Research is conducted using the Internet WWW as well as, and most importantly, value added databases, such as

• Lexis-Nexis US and foreign materials; Tax Treaties

• BNA US and foreign materials; especially the country by country tax materials

• BNA International

• CCH International databases jurisdiction by jurisdiction, and its global treatises

• CCH USA databases

• Butterworths UK and international materials, especially Commonwealth/Caribbean case law

• QuickLaw, especially Canadian and Commonwealth/Caribbean case law

• Checkpoint-RIA-WGL-Gee, especially the treatises that explain planning techniques by topics, such as estate planning, for jurisdictions

• Westlaw US and foreign materials

• Tax Analysts, especially its superior tax treaty database, foreign law and global tax update magazines

• Foreign Law Publishers - all foreign statues in English

• World Compliance database

• LLM and PhD thesis and dissertation databases

• historical tax research using databases such as Hein and CCH

• Matthew Bender databases

• Lois Law e-libraries

• amongst other databases that we subscribe to for you (see the external links in the classroom for details).

Also, the student should use the electronic book libraries and research the titles available.  Finally, the student is encouraged to use online legal research resources or university library or another library through a University library exchange program.