Business Law

In recent years, there has been a worldwide wave of using e-government as a mechanism to improve government's efficiency through transparency, openness and increasing interactions across governments, citizens, and the civil society organisations.

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has created new ways for children to harass and bully each other. It is unfathomable and somewhat ironic to see how the phenomenon of cyberbullying has affected our society and indeed most disturbing to hear cases of teenagers committing suicide or being severely emotionally scarred through the misuse of the latest communication tools that were designed to improve the quality of our lives. Unfortunately the ICT’s very nature of being always-on, accessible-from-anywhere, and often anonymous means of communication makes it difficult to regulate what children say or do to each other. This paper attempts to examine online bullying and harassment - also known as cyberbullying - within the Australian context. Essentially, it discusses the various issues associated with cyberbullying including definition and characteristics of cyberbullying; laws that may be applicable to such forms of harassment; consequences of an anonymous bullying act; and...

With 123 million Internet users, China represents a phenomenal potential market for e-business. The astounding success of China in attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) can be partially explained by a series of reforms of policies, regulations, and laws. Can the introduction of China's new electronic signatures law produce the same results for e-business in China? This paper analyses the electronic signatures law as a tool fashioned by Chinese lawmakers to encourage e-business growth in China as they encouraged FDI. We find that China has created an electronic signature law that mirrors the open, flexible, and everchanging e-environment. The fact that the law is not technology-specific, but rather technology-neutral, allowing for technological advances, is one of its strong points. A negative aspect of the law is its lack of a set guideline for identification requirements for purchasers of a reliable electronic signature, more commonly known as a digital signature, from electronic certification service providers. Despite the few negative aspects, the electronic signatures law should encourage the development of e-business in China.

The EU Electronic Signatures Directive is a good example of a dual approach. The legislation in China and Singapore are also considered as a dual approach. See Electronic Transactions Act 2004 (China) (for a translation and introduction into English of the Chinese Act, see Minyan Wang and

Ragging has become a serious social evil. Millions of university students are ragged in India every year. While a perpetrator can be sued by the victim; it has not dented the escalation of ragging. Holding institutions responsible for preventing ragging is the only way to curb it. This can be by way of both public and private accountability of universities. The paper focuses on the latter. We submit a victim of ragging can sue the university for failure to prevent ragging for breach of the university-student contract, for negligence, under vicarious liability, breach of statutory duty, contravention of a non-delegable duty, and on the basis of misfeasance in public office by a rogue university officer. A private action will have a salutary effect on society, in particular universities.

PurposeDespite grave public concerns over information privacy and ongoing academic explorations of privacy policy, there is a general lack of understanding toward this issue in the legal context in China, the largest e-commerce market in the world. Departing from the extant literature of general discussion in nature, the authors undertook an exploratory study on the efficacy of e-commerce websites' privacy policies in China from the legal perspective.Design/methodology/approachThe authors drew on a qualitative grounded theory approach to identify selective codes relating to the focal issue and established a theoretical framework therefrom. The authors then conducted theoretical integration by linking them to the Theory of Development Blocks and the System Justification Theory.FindingsThe research identifies a general distrust of Chinese consumers toward privacy policies and highlights that despite their growing concerns about privacy, the privacy policies are largely ineffective...

Import-Export of commodities between countries • Average cross-border transaction involves-27 to 30 different parties,-40 documents,-200 data elements (30 of which are repeated at least 30 times) and the re-keying of 60 to 70 per cent of data at least once. • Obtaining the necessary permits for import and export can take many weeks and sometime months in some economies.

Policies and procedures govern organizations whether they are private or public, for-profit or not-forprofit. Review of such policies and procedures are done periodically to ensure optimum efficiency within the organization. Framework analysis is a qualitative method that is aptly suited for applied policy research. Framework analysis is better adapted to research that has specific questions, a limited time frame, a pre-designed sample and a priori issues. In the analysis, data is sifted, charted and sorted in accordance with key issues and themes using five steps: familiarization; identifying a thematic framework; indexing; charting; and mapping and interpretation. Framework analysis provides an excellent tool to assess policies and procedures from the very people that they affect.