Choice of forum and cybercrime

In the words of the chair of the drafting committee behind the Council of Europe Convention on Cybercrime (Budapest Convention; CCC), cybercrime ‘is a term of ‘hype’ and not a legal definition’. For Clough, there are ‘almost as many terms to describe cybercrime as there are cybercrimes’. The ‘cyber’ element is, of course, a first crucial characteristic; as Walden recalls, much of the illicit activity which qualifies as cybercrime is a (novel) subset of computer crime. Infect a computer with a virus through a floppy disk or CD, for example, and this would lack the cyber element. Some attempts at defining the phenomenon have hitched developments in cybercrime to the development of the internet itself—​as is the case for ‘e-​crime 1.0’ and ‘e-​crime 2.0’. Alternatively, a focus on the victim or target is used: crimes against computers; crimes against property; illicit content; and (comparatively new—​take cyber-​harassment, for instance) offences against the person with a cyber element.