Fundamentals of Cyber Law

I am in trouble and I need your help. I have a laptop on which I have stored some information. And one day, an unauthorized person simply copied the data from my laptop onto his pen drive. Is this theft?

Even if we presume that intangible data is movable property, the concept of theft would still not apply as the possession of the data has not been taken from me. I still have the ‘original’ data on my laptop under my control. The thief simply has a ‘copy’ of that data. In the digital world, the copy and the original are indistinguishable in almost every case.

Every activity of yours in cyberspace can and will have a cyber-legal perspective. From the time you register your domain name, to the time you set up your web site, to the time you promote your website, to the time when you send and receive emails, to the time you conduct electronic commerce transactions, at every point of time, there are various cyber law issues involved.

You may not be bothered about these issues today because you may feel that they are very distant from you and that they do not have an impact on your cyber activities. But sooner or later, you will have to tighten your belts and take note of cyber law for your own benefit.

So, how do we define cyber crime? Well, simply put, a cyber crime is an unlawful act wherein the computer is either a tool or a target or both. New trends in cyber crime are emerging all the time, with costs to the global economy running to billions of dollars.

Interesting, right?

To learn more about the fundamentals of cyber laws, join our Diploma in Cyber Law course conducted with Government Law College, Mumbai.

Visit www.asianlaws.org/glc.php