International Trade Law on E-Commerce - Legal Aspects of E-Commerce | E-Commerce - B Com PDF Download

International Trade Law on E- Commerce: Faced with substantial use of the cyberspace and e-commerce now a days, many international organizations are working on the projects which have the potential to significantly influence the direction of domestic regulation in India in a number of areas relevant to electronic commerce.
India has been actively engaged in international projects. We think that these international works should be carefully monitored.

The United Nations commission on International Trade Law has suggested the Model Law on e-commerce to be followed by all the countries in the world. This law focuses on two basic functions of signature, namely, to identify the author of document and to confirm that the author approved the content of that document. The reading of these two paragraphs establishes the principles that in an electronic environment, the basic legal functions of a signature are performed by way of a method that identifies the originator of a data message and confirms that the originator approved the content of that data message.

The UNCITRAL (United Nations commission on International Trade Law) draft rules of Nov 1998, on electronic signatures make a clear distinction between electronic signatures, enhanced electronic signatures and digital signature.

According to draft, ‘electronic signature’ means data in electronic form in, affixed to a data message, and [that may be] used to [identify the signer of the data message and indicate the signer’s approval of the information contained in the data message]. 

Figure 5: UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures

Enhanced electronic signature’ means an electronic signature which is created and at the time, it was made can be verified through the application of a security procedure or combination of security procedures that ensures that such electronic signature is unique to the signer for the purpose for which and within the context. It can be used to identify objectively the signer of the data message.

‘Digital signature’ means an electronic signature created by transforming a data message digest function and encrypting the result transformation with an asymmetric cryptosystem using the signer’s private key, such that any person having the initial untransformed data message, the encrypted transformation, and the signer’s corresponding public key can accurately determine;

• Transformation was created using the private key that corresponds to the signer’s public key; and
• Whether the initial data message has been altered since the transformation was made.

Digital signature is a cryptographic transformation using an asymmetric cryptographic technique of the numerical representation of a data message, such that any person having the data message and the relevant public key can determine, that-

• The transformation was created using the private key corresponding to the relevant public key; and
• That the data message has not been altered since the cryptographic transformation.