A. Background
84. The criminal codes of all countries have, up to the present, predominantly protected tangible and
visible objects. Although protection for information and other intangible things or values existed
before the middle of the twentieth century, it did not play an important role until very recently. The
last few decades have seen significant changes: the development from industrial to post-industrial
society, the increasing value of information in economics, culture and politics, and the growing
importance of computer technology have led to legal challenges and new legal responses to
information law. In the 1970s, the resulting change of paradigm, from corporeal to incorporeal
objects, began to touch substantive criminal law, in several waves of computer crime legislation.
85. A new doctrine of criminal information is emerging in the area of al legal science, founded on the
still-developing concepts of information law and the law of information technology. In accordance
with modern cybernetics and informatics, information law now recognizes information as a third
fundamental factor in addition to matter and energy. Based on empirical analysis, this concept
evaluates information both as a new economic, cultural and political asset and as being specifically
vulnerable to unique forms of crime.
86. It is obvious in the new approach that the legal evaluation of corporal objects differs considerably
from the evaluation of incorporeal (information) objects. First, there is an important conceptual
distinction between information and data that is both technologically and legally relevant. Information
is a process or relationship that occurs between a person's mind and a stimulus. Data, whether in
corporeal or incorporeal (e.g. electromagnetic impulse) form, constitute a stimulus. Data are merely a
representation of information or of some concept. Information is the interpretation that an observer
applies to the data. Different information may be received from the same data, depending on their
interpretation. Thus, when data are destroyed or appropriated, it is the representation that is destroyed
or appropriated and not the actual information, idea or knowledge. The latter may still subsist in a
person's mind or in another copy of the data.
87. The second difference concerns the protection of the proprietor or holder of corporeal and
incorporeal objects. Whereas corporeal objects are more exclusively attributed good that flows freely
in a free society. It is not itself subject, therefore, to exclusive protection in the same way as tangible
property. A third difference between the legal regimes of tangibles and intangibles is that, in
protecting information, not only must one consider the economic interests of its proprietor or holder,
but one must also preserve the interests of those persons concerned with the contents of the
information. This aspect results in new issues of privacy protection, which is dealt with in chapter III.
88. Paragraphs 89-115 investigate how far the various national systems protect the holder of
information and paragraphs 116-126 examine activities undertaken in this field of law on the
international level.
This work is excerpted from an official document of the United Nations. The policy of this organisation is to keep most of its documents in the public domain in order to disseminate "as widely as possible the ideas (contained) in the United Nations Publications".
Pursuant to UN
Administrative Instruction ST/AI/189/Add.9/Rev.2
available in
English
only, these documents are in the public domain worldwide:
- Official records (proceedings of conferences, verbatim and summary records, …)
- United Nations documents issued with a UN symbol
- Public information material designed primarily to inform the public about United Nations activities
(not including public information material that is offered for sale)
.
Public domain
Public domain
false
false