Category: Cybercrime

Google attracts millions of web users every day. And, increasingly, it’s attracting plenty of lawyers, too. As Google has grown into the world’s most popular search engine and, arguably, the most powerful internet company, it has become entangled in scores of lawsuits touching on a wide range of legal questions, including copyright violation, trademark infringement and its method of ranking websites.

Paul Gibbons, 47, tracked down John Jones using details obtained online after the pair exchanged insults in an internet chatroom, a court heard.

The racists are at it… “Australian authorities are powerless to remove from the internet a downloadable board game based on the Cronulla riots. The game has recently surfaced on the internet and appears to incite racial violence.”

Internet gambling in the US was always dodgy – the analysts just turned a blind eye: Richard Wray’s article made much of the fact that internet gaming companies and British investors were caught out by the clampdown on gambling in the United States. Yet it is hard to argue that there weren’t very clear warning signals that it was about to happen.

A jury in Florida has awarded a woman $11.3m in costs and damages after a former acquaintance accused her of being a crook, a con artist and a fraudster on an internet talkboard. The award, believed to be the largest verdict of it sort relating to individual postings on bulletin boards or blogs, was handed down by a jury in Broward County, Florida, against a woman from Louisiana. The sum included $5m in punitive damages.

Bloggers beware: thoughtless musings in cyberspace can have costly consequences. That’s one lesson that might be gleaned from a Florida jury’s decision last week to order a Louisiana woman to pay $US11.3 million in compensation, after she used an internet forum to accuse another woman of being a con artist and a fraud. The damages award is believed to be the largest relating to amateur postings on the internet.

More people fear net crime than they do burglary or being mugged, a survey backed by the UK government suggests.

The world’s biggest banks are joining an international effort to crack down on child pornography on the internet by taking action to cut off its sources of financing. Under the proposals, the proposed body will share information about sites and paedophiles can have access to finance cut off.

If we were to stop for a moment and take the time to properly assess the community impact of internet pornography, it would soon become clear that internet pornography is not the height of evil which do-gooder parliamentarians and parental groups profess. Indeed, it is probably one of the main factors contributing to a notable reduction in violent crime over the last decade. Our community is safer and more peaceful thanks to internet pornography. This may sound counter-intuitive, but there are recent figures to back up the argument. In a paper just released in the United States titled Porn Up, Rape Down, Northwestern University Law Professor Anthony D’amato crunches the numbers to reach the conclusion: The incidence of rape in the United States has declined 85 per cent in the past 25 years while access to pornography has become freely available to teenagers and adults. The Nixon and Reagan Commissions tried to show that exposure to pornographic materials produced social violence. The reverse may be true: that pornography has reduced social violence.

A political argument that erupted in a remote corner of cyberspace and descended into vicious name-calling could lead to a spate of libel actions by contributors to internet message boards, the man at the centre of the case claimed.