President to sign E-commerce Bill digitally

The Government's E-commerce Bill will become law next week ail session yesterday. The when the President, Mrs McAleese will sign it - with a digital signature. The President will thus produce the first electronic signature to have the State's full legal recognition, as she brings into effect the legislation that makes this so.

"I think it's a good day for technology, the information age and especially for Irish business that we have passed this Bill," said the Minister for Public Enterprise, Ms O'Rourke, who sponsored the legislation. She spoke as the Bill was passed at the end of its committee and report sessions, which were held in the Dail chamber itself because of time constraints.

The Bill is seen as a cornerstone of e-commerce and is designed to enable businesses and citizens to do business over the Internet, ranging from registering property deeds to signing contracts, filing taxes, requesting medical information and corresponding with Government.

It sets out a formal legal framework for conducting business electronically, in nearly all cases giving equivalent recognition to electronic signatures. These signatures are not written names but an encoded sequence of characters that can be associated with a an individual at a specific time.

The Bill also recognises electronic forms of writing and documents - until now, paper versions alone were guaranteed legal weight.

It also clearly protects the right of businesses and individuals to use encryption - software programs that encode and decode electronic documents and emails.

One of the primary goals of the Bill is to guarantee the equivalency of electronic writing while ensuring technological neutrality - that one form of technology, such as a smart card combined with a software program, is not the only allowed way of producing a signature. The Bill is considered a good international model, according to privacy advocacy groups such as the Electronic Privacy Information Center in Washington, DC.

The Bill has had to struggle for Dail time and was nearly shelved until the next session in October after TDs talked out during the second half of its debate time a few weeks ago.

As a result, the entire Bill - including 30 committee-stage amendments, primarily from Mr Ivan Yates and Mr Simon Coveney and the Minister, plus two from Mr Brian O'Shea - had to be covered by yesterday. The Bill's passage yesterday was understood to be the result of a cross-party effort.

Discussion yesterday reflected a continuing concern with privacy issues, especially from Mr Yates.

The Minister also recognised the need to implement the Data Protection Act as soon as possible, and to make sure that existing consumer protections carry over to the online realm.

Deputies expressed a worry that computer users weren't adequately defended from spam (unsolicited commercial e-mail advertisements), which cause millions of pounds of problems for companies annually.