A workshop on 'Cyber Laws', which was held today jointly by the SV University's PG Department of Law and Asian School of Cyber Laws, Pune, felt that the consumers were more at ease while dealing with contracts manually rather than going in for transactions on the web though it was legalised by the Information Technology Act now.

The speakers expressed their surprise at the not-so-encouraging number of takers for the e-contracts though it was as common as the manual contracts, and the reason for this, as put by the speakers, was the fear of failure of the contracts due to the status of the websites, factors influencing the validation of the contracts and lack of clarity on the jurisdiction of the case while dealing with an offshore site, legal implications involved in case of a grievance.

The president of Asian School of Cyber Laws, Mr. Rohas Nagpal, said a stigma of insecurity was attached to the online payments, as customers fear misuse of credit card information by various bogus sites that were on the prowl on the Net. He admitted that the alarmingly huge number of such sites were posing a threat to the customers and were tarnishing the image of the genuineness and credibility of even honest sites.

Mr. Sanjeev Sharma, technology consultant, and Mr. Debasis Nayak, Intellectual Property Rights consultant of the school, also spoke on various topics like basics of Internet, intellectual property and its protection, digital signatures, cyber crime, penalties and other related issues. The speakers also urged the legal professionals present in the audience to learn the basics of web designing in order to advise their clients on the legal implications of e-contracts in the wake of such contracts obtaining legality through the Information Technology Act.

Earlier, the Head of the Department of Law, SVU. Prof. V. Hemalatha Devi, while welcoming the gathering, felt that the cyber world was developing into a promising area for the legal professionals and had opened the flood gates for cyber crimes and as such, there was wide scope for operation in this segment. Many leading lawyers, tax personnel, bankers, accountants and cyber businessmen participated in the workshop.