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Investigating the Use of Online Open Source Information as Evidence in European Courts

Online open source investigation is an inevitable trend. Researchers have also regarded investigating crimes with open source information as the new forensics. To be better prepared for the new forensics, it is essential to conduct research on the use of web-based evidence in courts. To investigate the use of online open source evidence in trial proceedings, we analyze the use of publicly available information on the Internet in European courts based on another publicly available information on the Internet: court records. We determine 29 European countries as the analysis scope, identify 31 legal databases as data sources, define the query keywords as top ten websites, collect 31514 court records and analyze four legal metadata from each record: name of court, date of decision, type of decision, and field of law. The analysis results show that (1) administrative courts utilize online open source information more than other court types; (2) the use of online open source information in trial proceedings has increased considerably over the past few years; (3) nearly two thirds of court records containing online open source information are judgment or decision; (4) over a quarter of court records with online open source information apply criminal laws; and (5) German court records include more online open source information than other 17 countries. The future work includes a thorough analysis of court records to examine whether the open source information is collected or analyzed from the Internet.