Should virtual cybercrime be regulated by means of criminal law? A philosophical, legal-economic, pragmatic and constitutional dimension

This paper will be about the question of whether or not virtual cybercrime should be regulated by means of criminal law. By virtual cybercrime I mean activities such as the stealing of virtual property or the killing of an avatar (a player's virtual representation) within the virtual worlds of computer games. One can, for example, also think of the production, distribution and possession of virtual child pornography, which does not consist of photographs or film material of real children engaged in sexually explicit conduct, but of computer-simulated children; for the images are photo-shopped or even entirely computer-generated. As the title indicates, I believe that the aforementioned question has at least four dimensions: a philosophical, a legal-economic, a pragmatic and a constitutional dimension. In this paper, I will study each of these dimensions and on the basis of my analyses I will establish criteria for the criminalization of virtual cybercrime which can be used to decide on actual cases.