The legal validity to digital signatures has changed the landscape for e-commerce globally. Along with popular applications like e-banking, e-tendering, and e-procurement, e-approvals, etc., the wagon of e-commerce is reaching new milestones everyday with the help of legally valid digital signatures. While assuring authentication and non-repudiation, digital signature (PKI) technology maintains integrity and confidentiality of digitally signed electronic documents.
Several countries have now come up with laws assigning legal validity to digital signatures, as the latter ensures authenticity, and security. Along with the security aspects, digital signatures also help businesses go paperless and efficient. Therefore, many countries are promoting the use of digital signatures, and are making their use mandatory in the applications, which deal with sensitive data.
In today’s ‘small’ world, organizations are utilizing ‘big’ tricks like Internet to reap maximum business benefits. And legality and security associated with digital signatures is helping them in generating pace and profits within their business ideas. Several countries have laid out certain legal standards that promote digital signatures. Let us have a look at some of the digital/electronic signature laws and regulations across the world put in place to encourage e-transactions:
· ESIGN Act (Electronic Signature in Global and National Commerce Act)
· UETA (Uniform Electronic Commerce Act)
· GPEA (Government Paperwork Elimination Act)
· EU law (EU Directive for Electronic Signatures)
· US DoD JITC (Joint Interoperability Test Command)
· Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)
· SOX (Sarbanes-Oxley Act)
· 21 CFR Part 11
· Indian IT Act 2000
Anything, which is legal, takes less time to become popular and stable in any form of social or business environment. The emphasis is given simulating ideas, which are established, or have gained popular ground. In case of digital signatures, worldwide legislations have fueled their acceptance in every possible business that we can think of. From banking to insurance, and from health care to retail, common consensus is moving towards digitally signed electronic documents, saving time, money, and paper.
Needless to say, organizations will adopt tools that are affordable, and yet faster and simpler than traditional ones. This so-called ‘cost-effective’ business approach is at the core of growing paperless environment. As we move ahead, the scope for paperless procedures will become broader.
Every industry, irrespective of its functionalities, is adopting digital signatures in one or the other way. From external communications to internal communications, digitally signed electronic documents have changed the way communications take place. Faster, simpler, yet secure and confidential, these communications have ignited the competition amongst businesses like never before. Digital signature solutions providers are also customizing their products to meet various requirements of several industries to serve their customers efficiently and effectively.
In the passage of time, digital signatures have become a tool to garner customers’ confidence and support. But at the core is digital signatures’ legal validity. From banking transactions to medial records, and from online loan applications to tendering, digital signatures have the ‘Golden Touch’ to transform hectic business processes into simpler ones.
Therefore, a tool for securing the integrity of digitally signed documents; the legal validity is pumping the acceptance of digital signatures in various environments. This legal validity is not only helping the end users, but also organizations to reach out to larger customer base with innovation and simplicity.
For more information on digital signature, please visit http://www.elock.com
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#1 by guzen on May 7th, 2010
do you know how to add your signature to youtube videos
#2 by rails on May 7th, 2010
@50unitedstates
Not sure, I scanned my signature on paper and then saved it as an image, then attached that image to my signature.
#3 by nacao on May 7th, 2010
Great job. i just have one question, what is the email address of document control?
#4 by Jessie Cheung on May 7th, 2010
Computer says: If I were to sign a message, I would take the private key and perform a fixed set of operations on it to obtain the signature.
Computer says: Therefore, if the key remains the same, the signature should remain the same.
Computer says: Exception: The signature may not remain the same on a windows machine because they're weird and don't know what they're doing.
#5 by yummytongue on May 7th, 2010
Microsoft Operating systems come with some built in drivers for many devices (those device manufacturers pay them a hefty dividend to have the drivers already built in office so that when a user plugs that device in the system, Vista/XP/2000/98 etc recognize that device automatically and user does not have to go through installing through CDs etc).
But some devices come later than when os was released or some devices dont go through this process. Hence when microsoft sees a device which it does not recognize, it spits out this warning.
Usually for good companies' products, you should not worry about this warning. For no name brands or very less known brands you should be a bit careful in installing since less testing of that driver being installed would have been done.
Good luck
#6 by earthlink on May 7th, 2010
HI, great video. I’m trying to create my digital, handwritten signature on the computer so that I can sign my name on Word or pdf documents. Is it possible to create a handwritten signature using a mouse and Photo Shop and then be able to just paste it into a document as needed? Thank you.
#7 by Veggie misses you............... on May 7th, 2010
Maybe this can help you understand what digital signature is
http://www.youdzone.com/signature.html
A digital certificate is an electronic "credit card" that establishes your credentials when doing business or other transactions on the Web. It is issued by a certification authority (CA). It contains your name, a serial number, expiration dates, a copy of the certificate holder's public key (used for encrypting messages and digital signatures), and the digital signature of the certificate-issuing authority so that a recipient can verify that the certificate is real. Some digital certificates conform to a standard, X.509. Digital certificates can be kept in registries so that authenticating users can look up other users' public keys.
http://searchsecurity.techtarget.com/sDefinition/0,,sid14_gci211947,00.html
#8 by hak8or on May 8th, 2010
try booting into safemode … uninstall ur graphics driver then reinstall it .. if that dont work i would slave the harddrive into another machine to retrieve data then reformat it ..
#9 by J.C on May 8th, 2010
#10 by corpo on May 8th, 2010
What do you put on organization unit and organization name?
#11 by urbantool on May 9th, 2010
I put the name of my company under organization and then I put the business unit under Organization Name. ie: Bureau Veritas / Power & Utilities
#12 by truth on May 9th, 2010
how do i take pictures off of adobe acrobat that someone gave you
#13 by psychic on May 9th, 2010
@cjkillashot
Does the “Print Screen” button on your computer not work? Not sure I understand the question.
#14 by ToniAward10 on May 10th, 2010
#15 by shahab_phoenix on May 10th, 2010
Go to Control Panel, select Internet Options,
select Advanced,
scroll down to the Security section at the bottom.
Uncheck the box that says "check for signatures on downloaded programs".
Click Apply.