Prosecuting Intellectual Property Crimes Manual
Over the past two decades, systematic misappropriation of intellectual property has become a major concern to American businesses, artists, and authors. As the modern economy grows increasingly reliant on intellectual property, the proliferation of computers and computer networks has made the illegal reproduction and distribution of protected material much easier to accomplish. Congress has enacted workable criminal laws prohibiting such misappropriation.
This manual begins in Chapter I with an overview of the legal protection of intellectual property. It first provides general background on intellectual property and the legal regimes employed to encourage its creation. It then explains the criminal law's role in addressing intellectual property misappropriation with a special focus on the recent Intellectual Property Rights Initiative.
Searching and Seizing Computers and Obtaining Electronic Evidence in Criminal Investigations
In the last decade, computers and the Internet have entered the mainstream of American life. Millions of Americans spend several hours every day in front of computers, where they send and receive e-mail, surf the Web, maintain databases, and participate in countless other activities.
Unfortunately, those who commit crime have not missed the computer revolution. An increasing number of criminals use pagers, cellular phones, laptop computers and network servers in the course of committing their crimes. In some cases, computers provide the means of committing crime. For example, the Internet can be used to deliver a death threat via e-mail; to launch hacker attacks against a vulnerable computer network; to disseminate computer viruses; or to transmit images of child pornography. In other cases, computers merely serve as convenient storage devices for evidence of crime. For example, a drug kingpin might keep a list of who owes him money in a file stored in his desktop computer at home, or a money laundering operation might retain false financial records in a file on a network server.
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