Are the courts ready to decide what is original or not?
Sec. 10 of the Electronic Commerce Act (RA8792) has provided how an electronic document can be considered original. To quote from the law, the originality is met by;
(a) the integrity of the information from the time when it was first generated in its
final form, as an electronic data message or electronic document is shown by evidence
aliunde or otherwise; and
(b) where it is required that information be presented, that the information is capable
of being displayed to the person to whom it is to be presented.
Whereas determining the criteria of presentability of a document is not a big problem for the court, ensuring the document's integrity would be a different matter. Although authentication of electronic documents to prove its integrity is provided under Rule 5 of the Rules on Electronic Evidence, I am intrigued on how technologically capable our courts are as well as tech-savvy our judges to really decide on the authencity of an electronic document. Unlike before when writing or typing documents would lead to the immediate creation of paper documents, electronic documents most often now remain to be in the electronic form (ie. e-mails, document files, etc.). When electronic documents are created, bits and pieces of the drafts leading up to the creation of the final document are written in temporary computer files, the swap files and in file slack. Furthermore, when computer-created documents are updated or erased, remnants of the original version and drafts leading up to the creation of the original version remain behind on the computer hard disk drive. From a very technically capable computer users these forms of 'ambient data' are valuable. With these 'ambient data', electronic documents can be created or re-created and be treated as the original. As more people are beginning to be technologically capable, I am afraid that the courts might be left behind and despite having rules governing electronic documents the courts may not really be able to authenticate what is original from what is not.
posted by e_teves @ 19:51
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