Why isn the current criminal law sufficient to deal with illegal online content?
Existing criminal laws apply to RC and X rated materials published, sold or hired using the Internet, where the resulting materials are expressed in hard-copy form, or stored in a disk-file. It was uncertain, however, whether the acts of publishing or transmitting materials over the Internet, accessing and/or storing materials in non-persistent memory, would be an offence. Section 85ZE of the Crimes Act 1914 makes it an offence to knowingly or recklessly use a carriage service in a manner which a reasonable adult would find offensive. Some prosecutions in relation to online content have been initiated under section 85ZE. However, successful prosecutions under this provision have been on the basis of guilty pleas and therefore its application to online services has not been fully tested by a court.
