The Role of Economic, Cultural, and Legal Backgrounds in the ICT Law – A Particular Examination on the Regulation of Electronic Signatures

This paper intends to explore how the different backgrounds, including economic development, culture, and legal system, impact on the regulation of electronic signatures. Are they relevant in such regulation and why? To what extent and in what way they have an impact on such regulations? It will contribute to the understanding and research on the role of economic, cultural and legal backgrounds in ICT laws and their harmonisation. It will choose four countries with completely different economic, cultural, and legal backgrounds to analyse and compare. These four countries will be the UK, the US, Germany and China, which are strong representatives of eastern and western countries, developed and developing countries, common law and civil law countries. They are also the strong examples of the different approaches adopted in electronic signatures law, that is, prescriptive, two-tiered and minimalist approaches, each based on different assumptions about the legal status of electronic signatures and their future. Through the comparison, it will identify the similarity and difference between the legislations in these countries and analyse the reasons underpinning such similarity and difference. In this way it will identify whether the different backgrounds have an impact on such regulation, to what extent and in which way. Therefore this paper will consist of four sections. First, it will briefly introduce what electronic signatures are and how they work. An electronic signature is defined generically as “data in an electronic form in, affixed to or logically associated with, a data message, which may be used to identify the signatory in relation the data message and indicate the signatory’s approval of information contained in the data message” 1 . Second, it will identify the different economic, cultural, and legal backgrounds in these four countries. Third, the regulatory status in the past and at present in these four countries will be critically examined and compared. And last, whether the different backgrounds are relevant to such regulation and why? To what extent and in which way? And then it will give the suggestions on the harmonisation of 1 See for example, UNCITRAL, The Model Law on E-signature 2001, Article 2(a), available at: www.uncitral.org.