In each case below, decide whether or not the act should be treated as a crime. Then for those that should be a crime, rank the acts from most serious to least serious. Explain your reasons.
In each case below, decide whether or not the act should be treated as a crime. Then for those that should be a crime, rank the acts from most serious to least serious. Explain your reasons.
a. Evan goes to the website where he usually buys music and realizes there is a glitch in the code which allows him to download three songs without paying for them.
b. Patty supervises Bill at work. She suspects that he is visiting pornographic websites instead of working. She looks at his history of websites visited, which confirms her suspicions. She fires him.
c. Dom and Harold launch a computer virus designed to slow down the U.S. air traffic control system in hopes that they can cause airplanes to crash.
d. David, 31, poses as a teenage boy at an online social networking site that is popular with high school students and arranges to meet a high school junior for a date.
e. Someone pretending to be with the Public Bank sends you an e-mail message saying there is a problem with your account and requesting that you send information, including your social security number, so that the problem can be corrected.
f. Nelly downloads her top 20 favorite songs from various sources and saves them to her personal music folder. The next day, Nelly uploads the songs to a peer-to-peer network so that her friends can download the songs to their personal music folders.
g. Anne, a college Freshman, the night before a 10-page paper is due, copies and pastes several pages of information from an online public encyclopedia, then writes a few pages herself. She does not cite her source and tries to pass off the entire paper as her original work.
Most Serious 1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7. Least Serious