The Legal Responsibility Of Certificate Authority

As mankind’s greatest invention in the 20th century, Internet has changed every aspect of human life completely. For example, e-commerce which uses Internet as a platform in commercial areas has greatly changed the trading pattern of the whole society. E-commerce entered a stage of an explosion of rapid development relying on the advantages of natural speed, convenience and low cost in nearly two decades. According to statistics, the scale of Chinese e-commerce market transactions for the year 2013 reached 10.2 trillion yuan, an increase of 29.9%. The market generally expected the total amount of online transactions will exceed the line in the next 3-5 years.Such a huge market which necessarily needs legal to regulate it to create a good market environment, otherwise it is difficult to maintain a long-term, healthy development. Viewing from the situation of e-commerce legislation and judicial practice of the world, as there are many unique characteristics which are completely different from the traditional form of the commercial transactions in the e-commerce area, it caused a great impact on traditional civil law and the whole legal system from every aspect. For example, ever since mankind get into the "social contract", they started to consider the signatures or seals as important symbols of the intention in their daily lives, and a recognition and attention on the trading behavior. Law has also recognized indicating parties confirm and guarantee to the content validity of the written business contracts in the ways of handwritten signature, seal or fingerprint in the traditional commercial transactions, and distinguish the approaches between originals and accessories in this way.However, this approach cannot be used in the highly-paperless e-commerce, so people invented the electronic signature to solve this problem. Although electronicsignatures can be a good alternative to traditional handwritten signatures in e-commerce area, it also has some risks such as it cannot establish substantive link between the signature and the signer or verify the identity of the signer authenticity and so forth, which cannot be resolved by technical means. There by, electronic signature certification ensues. Electronic signature certification learned from the practice that the traditional hand-written can be authenticated by a third party organization to enhance its security, established a reliable link between the electronic signature and the signer, and gave both parties the inquiry channels to confirm the true identity of the signer, which solve the credit problem arising from non-trading across, and bridge the gap between the network and virtual reality which is the fundamental to establish a credit system in e-commerce.It is because of the important role of electronic authentication services, the market’s demand for it is also increasing with the rapid development of e-commerce. Although China’s electronic signature certification industry started late, over the past 10 years, large-scale electronic signature certificate authority (referred to as CA) Shanghai Tianjin, Guangdong, Hubei and other areas have been established one after another. As an emerging industry, there are many problems in its development at present, such as unsound management mechanism, imperfect certification process and lacking of transaction security and so on. One of the root causes of these problems is the imperfect regulatory system and the lack of legislation. What is the nature of electronic signature certificate authority? How to allocate the rights and obligations of the parties in the electronic signature certification? What is the nature of the legal relationship between the parties? These are all required legal theories to explain. Although China has promulgated the "People’s Republic of China Electronic Signature Law" and its accompanying "The Approach of Electronic Certification Service Management" in 2004, most of which are administrative law or norms of criminal law which is lack of provision of civil legal, and the rapid development of e-commerce industry is also proposed amendments requirements to the legal. The author found one of one of the key missing contents of the China’s electronic signature legislation in the process of researching the electronic signature certification laws is that there is no provision for how to distribute the civil liability of the electronic signature certification. Electronic signature certification is a high risk industry, and its development is not mature in our country, so it appears a lot of civil disputes in practice. Articles is divided into five parts:The first part is the electronic signature and electronic signature certification of legal issues general exposition, including the contents of the legal effect of electronic signatures, the scope of the legal effect of electronic signature certification, etc;The second part analyzes the legal nature of the relationship of electronic signature authentication certificate user authentication and certification agencies and institutions and certificate trust between the parties;The third part discusses the rights and obligations and legal responsibilities of electronic signature certification bodies, specifically discusses the nature of their legal obligations, such as the source and content of constituent elements;The fourth part is a discussion of the burden of proof for legal electronic signature certification bodies Principle of Liability and certification bodies should bear;The fifth part is thinking about the electronic signature certification restrictions and liability exemption regime, explains the necessity to limit liability and exempt from certification bodies and specific systems can be used.The third, fourth and fifth part is the focus of the article.