PIU report and human rights: e-commerce Bill

[Nicholas Bohm]

At 05:14 PM 6/15/1999 +0100, Duncan Campbell wrote:

[snip]

>Re crypto : my own view is that that flaw in the PIU notion that breaches 
>Article 6 will be spotted on day one and would never actually have to be 
>taken out of the Bill in Parliament.   But it is another indication of how 
>completely flustered HMG are over this entire issue.   After the drubbing 
>from the T&I Select Committee and given the confusion that PIU has shown up 
>over the proposed crypto key disclosure law, surely the right thing to do 
>is ditch the e-commerce bill entirely and put the crypto issue into the 
>IOCA review, which is where it belongs all along.    Any takers?

There is in fact some unglamorous but useful work for a sensible E-Commerce
Bill to do, as I argued in a letter recently published in the Law Society's
Gazette:

"The DTI should go all out to remove unnecessary obstacles to the use of
electronic documents, should leave the market to discover whether public
key infrastructures are of any real use, and should give consumers some
added protection by extending card issuers' joint liability with merchants
to overseas transactions and the use of debit cards.  Those are measures
that would really do something to make the UK a good place for electronic
commerce.

And now that attempts to push through key escrow on the back of electronic
commerce legislation have at last been abandoned, the DTI should leave
criminal justice legislation to a separate Bill in the hands of the Home
Office: otherwise it will only continue to leave the unwise impression that
the Internet is all about crime."

There are a few cases where the law requires paper between private parties,
and would need legislation (and some administrative adaptations) to accept
electronic documents.  Those I can think of are:

Contracts dealing with interests in land
Contracts of guarantee
Contracts of marine insurance
Legal assignments of debt
Assignments of patents and trademarks
Trust instruments
Wills

There are no doubt many requirements for official forms, returns, etc, etc,
to be on paper, which also need adaptation.  There is a real job of work
here and, as the Select Committee observed, the DTI hasn't buckled down to it.

Regards,

Nicholas Bohm

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