Social Sciences in China (Chinese Edition)

No.10, 2018

 

New Online Crime Legislation and Its Application

(Abstract)

 

Pi Yong

 

New online crime is a development of online crime; if we are to contain the latter, we must fight the former. However, since it differs from traditional crime in that the crime is constituted by amount of offenses, it is hard to apply the relevant provisions of criminal law to it and to obtain self-consistent theoretical explanations of substantive preparatory offense and accomplice in a crime. New online crime legislation is legislation that provides a legitimate response to the new changes in online crime. The key to meeting the conditions for criminality and penalization lies in utilizing the essential factors of the particular criminal methodology of information networks and limiting the crime’s capacity to harm. The social harm of new online crime itself is relatively slight; circumstantial factors are elastic; and the relevant criteria for judicial application are unclear. This leads to a low rate of application and undue expansion of the ambit of crimes. To make legislation on online crime fully effective, we should draw up rational judicial rules based on the special constitution of such crimes and put rational limits on the main elements constituting the crimes, while also classifying important circumstantial elements and limiting interpretations.