Computers, Crimes, and Privacy

School of Law

Santa Clara University

Spring 1997

Lecture Notes Outline

D. Friedman


Some comments on my suggested ideas for papers

 

Regulating Encryption

Is ITAR Constitutional? Is it enforceable? [ITAR classified encryption software as a munition, so you needed state department (now Commerce dept) permission to export software that you could legally sell in the U.S.]

Clipper 1, 2, 3?: Is there a constitutional (and politically and technologically viable) way of controlling encryption? [Clipper 1 was the clipper chip, Clipper 2 is the attempt to require that private encryption software provide for escrowed keys accessible to a court order, Clipper 3 could be any way of achieving the same objective--giving government access to cryptographically protected communications]

 

Regulating the Net

Protecting Intellectual Property on the Net: Law or Technology? [Do we try to make copyright enforceable, perhaps by making software for overcoming copy protection illegal, or do we try to use encryption and similar techniques to make it possible for the owners of intellectual property to directly control who uses it?]

 

The Legal System in a World of Strong Privacy

 

Can Hubert Humphrey police the Internet? [the attorney General of Minnesotta has announced that offering gambling on the net where his citizens can get at it is in violation of Minnesotta law and will be prosecuted--see link. ]

 

Does Cyberspace Need Its Own Laws? [Alternatives include generalizing existing law to apply to cyberspace, depending on existing law as applied to realspace objects--for instance, computers and phone lines--to control behavior, depending on contract, ...]

 

Norms of the Net: How are They Enforced, Do They Work? [There are a lot of behavioral norms, for instance on Usenet News, that get enforced by social pressure. Is that an adequate approach? Does it remain adequte as the size of the net community grows?]

 

Who Has Jurisdiction in Cyberspace? [If someone in Minnesota gambles in a cybercasino physically located in the Bahamas, with the messages forwarded across computers in four other states and two other countries, whose law applies?]

 

Can pornography and gambling be regulated on the Internet: Legal and technical issues.

 

Obscenity and Harassment: Legal and Technical Approaches

 

Online Defamation [Is it slander? Libel? Why do we treat them differently, and which is it more like?]

 

Living With the New World

Viruses: The facts and their legal implications.

 

Hard Disks, Encryption, and the Fifth Amendment--can you refuse to give the police your password?

 

Computer Crime in the Twenty-first Century

 

Shareware: An Experiment in Unprotected Intellectual Property

 

Cyberpunk: Does SF Get the Legal Issues Right? (True Names, Snowcrash, Trouble and Her Friends, ...)

 

Privacy and Computer Crime in a World of Many Nations

 

The Church of Scientology vs anon.penet.fi [See link]

 

Universities, Free Speech, Harassment: Recent Cases and General Conclusions

[Cornell case, which some see as suppression of unpopular free speech by a university, and Caltech case. See links for both]

----

1/21/97

 

The Development of Computer Law

1/23

Computer Crime Stuff


On to part II of the Outline

Back to Table of Contents Page

Back to Course Home Page