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Cyber Laws differ from other laws in many respects. One such difference is in the close interaction technology has on various aspects of the Law. Changes in technology introduces both challenges and solutions to legal problems in the Cyber space. Hence the study of Cyber Law cannot be divorced from the study of Technology. At the same time when Technology seems to affect some established legal principles, there is a need to look at the problems with an open mind and examine if law has to adopt to technology instead of the other way round as is the norm in the Meta society.

Take for example the law of "Digital Contracts". It is dependent on the technology of Digital signatures. The legally accepted standard of digital signature today is the PKI technology which is an offshoot from applied modular mathematics. This means that the law of digital contracts are dependent on the technology standards such as MD5 or PKCS#7

When MD5 is cracked or a new and better technology for Digital Signatures is developed by technologists, it becomes essential for Law to take a re look at the provisions and change them if necessary. Thus it is the technology that drives law in the field of Cyber laws.

In the common law also there may be some instances of developments in the society driving changes in law. But this phenomenon is more pronounced in the Cyber World since the society itself is created out of technology and every transaction therein is a product of technology.

The dependency of law on technology and standards in Cyber world can be gauged from the following simple hypothetical example.

Let's say that tomorrow Microsoft decides to completely disable "Times New Roman" fonts from all its products including the Internet Explorer. Then most of the documents that users may have in their computers or on the web becomes intelligible. So what will happen to  documents already exchanged and those in transit? What will be their legal eligibility?

When confronted with such issues the law has to contemplate if it has to define the standards for documents acceptable in law. Should we then say that only text documents in ASCII are acceptable for legal purpose? Law should also think if by making a ".doc" document acceptable, are we making it mandatory to have Microsoft Word application a necessary tool at the recipient's end?

The emergence of HTML as a language of the web and the web browser becoming a platform independent universal document creation tool, HTML qualified itself as a defacto standard for electronic documents. However, the need to enhance the web experience gradually introduced  "scripts" as a part of the HTML . This complicated the language and introduced deviance from the previously agreed standards. Microsoft with its powerful hold on Windows gradually edged out Netscape and along with it the components of web language not developed by Microsoft itself.

As a partial solution to the need to enhance the capability of web experience, XML was developed as an extension of the HTML with user defined tags.

XML was developed as a set of rules for designing text formats. It enabled presentation of Structured data including things like spreadsheets, address books, configuration parameters, financial transactions, and technical drawings. in a manner easy for a computer to generate data, read data, and ensure that the data structure is unambiguous. XML avoided the common pitfalls in language design by being  extensible, platform-independent, and  supporting internationalization and localization.

Now to update the standards of business communication, a new standard called ebXML is being developed. ebXML aspires to become the global standard for electronic business, enabling anyone, especially small and medium-size enterprises, anywhere to do business with anyone else over the Internet.

The vision is to create a global electronic market place where enterprises of any size, anywhere can:

• Find each other electronically
• And conduct business
• Using XML messages
• According to standard business process sequences
• With clear business semantics
• According to standard or mutually agreed trading partner protocol agreements
• Using off the shelf purchased business applications

The end-to-end B2B XML Framework covers many bases such as

• Core Components
• Registry and Repository
• Collaborative Protocol Profiles (CPPs)
• Agreements(CPAs)
• Message Service

While a detailed analysis of this technology is out of place here, it is clear that a new technology standard has emerged that will need to be factored into any E-Commerce law or its interpretation in future.

Will law "Reject" or "Accommodate" such standards? Will the drafting of laws make it mandatory for Courts to reject some of the standards otherwise brought in by W3C Consortium is a matter to be debated.

An example in the Indian scenario is the disallowance of encryption standards in excess of 40 bit technology through ISP guidelines while technology standards are already crossing 1024 bit encryption.

Yet another example in the Indian context is the non acceptance in law of any digital Certificates issued by CA s not licensed in India while it may conform to the global technology standards.

In order to avoid unnecessary court battles on Technical Standards Vis a Vis Legal Standards, it is necessary for the Cyber Laws of a country to provide some mechanism by which the legal standards get automatically updated. If this is likely to introduce a bit of uncertainty in law, there could at least be a "Technology sub committee" on the lines of the Cyber Regulations Advisory   Committee" to advise the Government periodically on certain aspects of technology standards that have an impact on Law.

Naavi

 May 8, 2002

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ebXML, Emerging Global standard for Business

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