Implications of IT Bill for Other Industries
The Act has already evoked lot of interest in a number of Foreign Service providers. Companies like Verisign & Baltimore, who specialise in encryption and PKI software, have already opened shop in India and have announced tie ups with software companies. This apart the Act is also likely to spur indigenous entrepreneurs to come with their own crypto algorithms and software.
Even before the Act was in place, a few banks (particularly the new private sector banks and a few foreign banks) had started offering e-commerce support services. They had mainly relied on their own paper documentation and the willingness of the customers to experiment. However, now that the Act is in place, it is expected to add momentum to e-commerce activities in India.
The Act definitely contains lot of grey areas and many points/ issues are open to interpretation. Even in the US, where IT related laws have matured much more, many issues are still unresolved. Therefore, in our view, the Act will definitely induce many lawyers to specialise in the IT related cases and thus there is a distinct possibility of a special class of lawyers emerging.
The Act encourages maintenance of electronic records. This would encourage all companies to progressively move to standardised data storage in electronic form. They would also now require verification and certification of internal security procedures for preserving electronic records.
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