Electronic Signature: The Core Legislation Category in Digital Economy

Abstract

E-Business, as well as all of the active participants in the digital economy environment, raises a host of new legal issues that must cope with the fact that the technical expectations imposed by participation in digital economy will increase. Besides technology implementation, it is evident that the biggest barriers to E-Business today come from the notion that people don’t trust the security and authenticity of the E-Business environment. Since the companies doing E-Business activities are not operating in an unregulated world, the old rules still apply in the new digital environment. Considering the functionality and applicability of such issues, this chapter is finding one, generic shaped, key category that links all of the separate E-Business legal issues in one regulated scene – the answer is done by introducing the electronic signature as the equivalent of a hand-written signature no matter what type of information technology is in use. There are more legal environments, solutions and applications of electronic signature from which several examples are described accompanied with the E-Business view on electronic signature utilization.