number without her consent, resulted in telephone calls to Complainant in the belief that she was soliciting sexual favors. Defendant, a purported family friend of Complainant, was apparently motivated by a desire to marry Complainant. When Complainant’s marriage ended in divorce, Defendant resumed contact with her and, on her refusal to marry him, began his cyber harassment. The court, relying on testimony from witnesses at the cyber café where the behavior took place, on experts, and on cyber forensic evidence, convicted Defendant of “transmitting obscene material in electronic form” under Section 67 of Information Technology Act 2000 (§§ 469 & 509, Indian Penal Code). The Act has drawn subsequent controversy as a vaguely worded criminal statute, predicated on the meaning of “obscene” material as one that could be used to curtail any sexually explicit material. While cybercrime has a fairly low conviction rate, this case, the first of its kind, was prosecuted in just seven months. The first case of successful cybercrime conviction in India, and with such rapid conviction, this case represents a significant landmark in the fight against cybercrime. D. Innovative Criminal Prohibitions The relationship between virtual and physical worlds has meant that laws ordained for the physical world and to tangible property have sometimes been applied to cyberspace and to virtual property.48 Applying physical-crime laws to cybercrime has been particularly prevalent with respect to theft and fraud, although doing so has met with varying degrees of success. On the one hand, in 2012, the Dutch Supreme Court confirmed a conviction for theft of electronic goods on the basis of existing, unadapted law.49 Similarly, in the United States illegally acquiring or using another’s “means of identification” with the intent to commit an unlawful act is a crime.50 Elsewhere, computer forgery, fraud by false representation, wrongful impersonation of another person, defamation and dissemination of information violating another’s personal privacy have all been accepted as crimes committed in cyberspace on the basis of physical-world crimes.51 On the other hand, however, other legal systems have not always considered hacking as theft, typically on the basis that hacking normally does not “permanently deprive” the victim of the goods, and, as such, should be understood as a form of involuntary sharing, rather than theft. Regardless of the answer to whether laws written for the physical world should be applied to the electronic world, legal systems have created corresponding categories and definitions of offenses52 aimed specifically at protecting the substantial, new interests and opportunities possible in the cyberworld.53 For example, a virtual version of harassment exists in many legal systems: cyberharassment has been defined as a person’s “use [of] a network or electronic communications service or other electronic means to annoy or cause damage to his correspondent, or to install any device intended to commit the offense and the attempt to commit it”.54 Similarly, because the internet allows for the immediate dissemination of sensitive information and images in the absence Page 20 | Chapter 1 | § B. Phenomenon & Dimensions of Cybercrime Table of Contents