> My point is this: of necessity, most laws are broad and vague, and it relies on judges to build the necessary case law to interpret it. Not if you're living

> My point is this: of necessity, most laws are broad and vague, and it relies on judges to build the necessary case law to interpret it. Not if you're living in Continental Europe, where case law doesn't exist, precedence rarely matters, and all law is statutory law. German law had to be amended for certain cases of computer criminality, e.g. illegally obtaining access to data which was impossible before without breaking into a building and stealing physical documents, so it was usually covered by theft before; or destroying data, which was just destroying physical things before. There were also problems around faking access tokens which is a bit like faking a document (think passport), but really not the same thing. But there is no special case for something like computer fraud, that's just covered by regular fraud. Edit: I stand corrected, there's actually a law about computer fraud: http://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/263a.html http://dejure.org/gesetze/StGB/263a.html, though it's essentially a reference to the law about regular fraud. The difference is apparently that fraud is defined as tricking _somebody_, and computer fraud happens without tricking a human person (but rather a program).