LLM Group 3 Law of Intellectual Property and Information Technology Information Technology Cyber Laws 2025-26 Question Paper with Solutions

For full marks, cover: the question has two limbs. The first is descriptive: show HOW the Act gives effect to the Model Law, beginning with its preamble and then mapping the Model Law's articles onto the Act's sections, with a table. The second is where the marks are: EVALUATE HOW FAR it succeeded. Say where India copied faithfully (writing, retention, acknowledgment, time and place), where it departed (signature and evidence), what it omitted, and what it added that UNCITRAL never contemplated. Work Bhagwandas Kedia, P.R. Transport Agency, Trimex and Anvar P.V. as the cases that show the provisions in operation.

3. Technology neutrality. The rules must not favour one technology, so they survive technological change.
4. Party autonomy. Article 4: the provisions on communication of data messages may be varied by agreement.

How the Act gives effect to it: the preamble and Chapter III

The preamble records the purpose. It recites that the General Assembly adopted the Model Law by resolution A/RES/51/162, that it recommended all States give favourable consideration to it when enacting or revising their laws, and that it is considered necessary to give effect to that resolution and to promote efficient delivery of Government services by means of reliable electronic records. The Act is therefore, by its own declaration, India's enactment of the Model Law, and a court may use the Model Law as an aid to construction.

The recognition provisions follow the Model Law closely. The mapping every answer should carry is this:

Section 4 provides that where any law requires information to be in writing or in typewritten or printed form, the requirement is deemed satisfied if the information is rendered or made available in electronic form and accessible so as to be usable for a subsequent reference. That is article 6, criterion intact. Section 7 reproduces article 10's three conditions for retention: accessibility for subsequent reference, retention in the original format or one demonstrably representing it accurately, and retention of the details identifying origin, destination, date and time.

P.R. Transport Agency v. Union of India, AIR 2006 All 23, shows section 13(3) working. Bharat Coking Coal auctioned coal electronically. The petitioner, whose place of business was at Chandauli with an office at Varanasi, won the bid for four thousand tonnes; the acceptance was emailed on 19 July 2005, eighty-one lakh twelve thousand rupees were paid, and no coal was supplied. The respondents objected that no cause of action arose in Uttar Pradesh. The Allahabad High Court held that under section 13(3) the email was received at the petitioner's place of business, so the contract was completed in Uttar Pradesh and the High Court had jurisdiction. The Model Law rule did exactly what it was designed to do.

Trimex International FZE Ltd. v. Vedanta Aluminium Ltd., (2010) 3 SCC 1, shows non-discrimination. A Dubai trader offered bauxite by email on 15 October 2007, and after several exchanges Vedanta confirmed five shipments by email on 16 October 2007. Vedanta later argued that no formal agreement had been signed, so there was no concluded contract and no arbitration clause. The Supreme Court held that a contract was concluded by the exchange of emails once the essential terms were agreed, and the absence of a signed formal agreement did not affect it. That is article 5 and article 11 applied, and section 10A now says it in terms.

As enacted in 2000, India went further and was technology specific. Section 3 recognised only the digital signature, made with an asymmetric crypto system and hash function. The Information Technology (Amendment) Act, 2008, in force 27 October 2009, corrected this by inserting section 3A on electronic signatures. Section 3A(2) sets out reliability conditions (signature creation data linked to the signatory and to no other person and under his sole control, and any alteration to the signature or the information detectable) taken from article 6(3) of the UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Signatures, 2001. But a technique counts only once the Central Government adds it to the Second Schedule, which today lists e-authentication using Aadhaar or other e-KYC services (from 2015) and signing through a trusted third party (from 2020).

The consequence is institutional. Because the acceptable methods are prescribed, India needed a regulator to license their suppliers: the Controller of Certifying Authorities and the whole of Chapters VI to VIII. The Model Law needed none. This is the largest single departure, and it trades flexibility for certainty.

Anvar P.V. v. P.K. Basheer, (2014) 10 SCC 473, was an election petition in which recordings of speeches were produced on compact discs without the certificate. The Supreme Court held the certificate under section 65B(4) mandatory: without it an electronic record produced as secondary evidence is inadmissible however genuine, and sections 65A and 65B are a complete code. It overruled State (NCT of Delhi) v. Navjot Sandhu, (2005) 11 SCC 600, which had allowed proof by oral evidence. When Shafhi Mohammad v. State of Himachal Pradesh, (2018) 2 SCC 801, relaxed the certificate for a party not in possession of the device, a three-judge Bench in Arjun Panditrao Khotkar v. Kailash Kushanrao Gorantyal, (2020) 7 SCC 1, overruled it and restored Anvar, holding the certificate unnecessary only where the original device itself is produced. Section 63(4) of the Adhiniyam now requires the certificate at each instance of submission, signed by the person in charge and an expert. Whatever its merits, this is the opposite of article 9's approach.

The additions have no Model Law counterpart. The Controller and licensing regime (Chapters VI and VII), penalties and compensation (Chapter IX), the appellate machinery (Chapter X), offences (Chapter XI), the State's powers of interception, blocking and traffic monitoring in sections 69 to 69B, critical information infrastructure in sections 70 to 70B, and the intermediary safe harbour in section 79. The Act is a commerce statute with a regulatory and a criminal statute attached.

Critical evaluation: how far the incorporation succeeded

The case against is equally real. A method of signing accepted across most Model Law States is not accepted in India unless prescribed, and that divergence falls exactly where cross-border transactions most need certainty. The certificate requirement has generated a decade of litigation that article 9 was designed to avoid. And without article 13(3), the commonest modern dispute, an instruction sent from a compromised account, is left to agency and estoppel rather than to a rule the counterparty abroad would recognise.