Cybercrime: Digital Cops in a Networked Environment Jack M. Balkin, James Grimmelmann, Eddan Katz, Nimrod Kozlovski, Shlomit Wagman and Tal Zarsky (editors)
NYU Press, 2007
The Internet has dramatically altered the landscape of crime and national security, creating new threats, such as identity theft, computer viruses, and cyberattacks. Moreover, because cybercrimes are often not limited to a single site or nation, crime scenes themselves have changed. Consequently, law enforcement must confront these new dangers and embrace novel methods of prevention, as well as produce new tools for digital surveillance - which can jeopardize privacy and civil liberties.
Cybercrime brings together leading experts in law, criminal justice, and security studies to describe crime prevention and security protection in the electronic age. Ranging from new government requirements that facilitate spying to new methods of digital proof, the book is essential to understand how criminal law-and even crime itself-have been transformed in our networked world.
Contributors: Jack M. Balkin, Susan W. Brenner, Daniel E. Geer, Jr., James Grimmelmann, Emily Hancock, Beryl A. Howell, Curtis E.A. Karnow, Eddan Katz, Orin S. Kerr, Nimrod Kozlovski, Helen Nissenbaum, Kim A. Taipale, Lee Tien, Shlomit Wagman, and Tal Zarsky.
The State of Play: Law, Games, and Virtual WorldsJack M. Balkin and Beth Simone Noveck (editors)
NYU Press, 2006
The State of Play presents an essential first step in understanding how new digital worlds will change the future of our universe. Millions of people around the world inhabit virtual words: multiplayer online games where characters live, love, buy, trade, cheat, steal, and have every possible kind of adventure. Far more complicated and sophisticated than early video games, people now spend countless hours in virtual universes like Second Life and Star Wars Galaxies not to shoot space invaders but to create new identities, fall in love, build cities, make rules, and break them.
As digital worlds become increasingly powerful and lifelike, people will employ them for countless real-world purposes, including commerce, education, medicine, law enforcement, and military training. Inevitably, real-world law will regulate them. But should virtual worlds be fully integrated into our real-world legal system or should they be treated as separate jurisdictions with their own forms of dispute resolution? What rules should govern virtual communities? Should the law step in to protect property rights when virtual items are destroyed or stolen?
These questions, and many more, are considered in The State of Play, where legal experts, game designers, and policymakers explore the boundaries of free speech, intellectual property, and creativity in virtual worlds. The essays explore both the emergence of law in multiplayer online games and how we can use virtual worlds to study real-world social interactions and test real-world laws.
Information Technology in TheoryPelin Aksoy and Laura DeNardis
Course Technology, 2007
Explore the expansive world of information technology (IT) with this innovative book that will engage as it educates. The purpose of Information Technology in Theory is threefold: to provide a comprehensive and engaging overview of cutting-edge information technologies, to identify and discuss the fundamental principles underlying these technologies, and to investigate the reciprocal relationship between these technologies and society. Unlike other books on the market that focus exclusively on either the non-technical, business aspects of IT or the technical, computer-focused aspects, this book presents technical information along with discussions of how this information plays a role in everyday business, economic, and social life. Using state-of-the-art technologies and real-world examples, coverage includes the fundamental principles of how computers work, the mathematical and physical properties underlying digital multimedia creation, networking technologies, and key social issues in network security. With this breadth of knowledge, readers will acquire a valuable framework for formulating their own opinions about the important issues that today's IT environment raises.
Web Search: Multidisciplinary PerspectivesAmanda Spink and Michael Zimmer (editors)
Springer, 2008
Web search engines have emerged as one of the dominant technologies of modern life, leaving few aspects of our everyday activities untouched. Search engines are not just indispensable tools for finding and accessing information online, but have become a defining component of the human condition and can be conceptualized as a complex behavior embedded within an individual's everyday social, cultural, political, and information-seeking activities.
This book investigates Web search from the non-technical perspective, bringing together chapters that represent a range of multidisciplinary theories, models, and ideas about Web searching. They examine the various roles and impacts of Web searching on the social, cultural, political, legal, and informational spheres of our lives, such as the impact on individuals, social groups, modern and postmodern ways of knowing, and public and private life. By critically examining the issues, theories, and formations arising from, and surrounding, Web searching, Web Search: Multidisciplinary Perspectives represents an important contribution to the emerging multidisciplinary body of research on Web search engines.
The new ideas and novel perspectives on Web searching gathered in this volume will prove valuable for research and curricula in the fields of social sciences, communication studies, cultural studies, information science, law, and related disciplines.