June 2002
Under Section 7 of the Electronic Communications Act 2000, electronic signatures or e-signatures are made legally admissible in the UK. Librarians have for a long time been asking whether the prescribed library copyright declaration forms may be received electronically so this appeared to be good news. In June last year, a delegation from LACA had a meeting with the Copyright Directorate of the Patent Office to ascertain if that really did mean that copyright declaration forms, which are required to be signed by a requester, may be received electronically and if so, did the library and archives regulations (S.I.1212:1989) have to be amended to incorporate this. The Patent Office took over a year to think about it but has now confirmed that, in their understanding, the regulations already cover e-signatures and so the S.I. would not need to be changed. In the S.I., it states that the signature of the person requiring a copy of a copyright item must be in "writing". "Writing" is defined in the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 (S.178) as including any form of notation or code, whether by hand or otherwise. It is believed, therefore, that the signature can be in electronic form. This argument is helped by the fact that the S.I. does not require the exact form A to be used as long as the declaration is substantially the same as given in form A.
So, we could have accepted e-signatures on declaration forms for years? No, as the signature has to be personal. If the declaration form is received electronically how can a personal signature be achieved? The signature, therefore, would have to clearly identify the individual and must not easily be used by others. The Patent Office says that deciding what form of e-signature fulfils these criteria is a matter for experts in the area. The Electronic Signatures Directive defines "electronic signature" to mean "data in electronic form which are attached to or legally associated with other electronic data and which serve as a method of authentication". This may be too broad a definition to satisfy the requirement for a personal signature. However, the Directive goes on to define an "advanced electronic signature" which appears to satisfy a requirement for a personal signature as it has to be "uniquely linked to and capable of identifying the signatory".
To sum up, it looks like librarians may receive declaration forms electronically as long as the personal signature requirement is fulfilled. This means that the signature has to have some unique link to the requester e.g. linked to some form of authentication system. LACA would be pleased to hear about any system set up to do this.
Updated: 20 September 2007