UK New Haven for Computer Crimes?

Under the UK’s Computer Misuse Act, denial of service attack isn’t apparently a crime. A British teenager has been recently cleared of launching a denial-of-service attack against his former employer.

At Wimbledon Magistrates Court in London, District Judge Kenneth Grant ruled that the teenager had not broken the CMA, under which he was charged. The defendant was accused of sending 5 million e-mail messages to his ex-employer that caused the company’s e-mail server to crash.

“On the narrow issue of an authorized or unauthorized modification, I concluded that no reasonable tribunal could conclude that the modification caused by the e-mails sent by the defendant were unauthorized within the meaning of section 3,” Grant added.

UK anti-spam law, which preceded CAN-SPAM, hasn’t been able to bring to justice a single spammer in almost two years of existence. Now, to add salt to injury, it has been further clarified that it is ok to spam business email addresses.

And now ZDNet reports that Rootkit DRM software by Sony, which essentially makes your computer vulnerable to external attacks when you simply play their CD, is actually legal in UK.

And I thought CAN-SPAM was bad!