Computer information has to be protected as a proprietary
Date: October 15, 2003Source: Computer Crime Research Center
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... infringing property rights to information.
This infrastructure forms a chain: law-court-penalty. The law should stipulate the liability and authorities of the property right subject. Every such subject responds for exceeding his authorities and violating property rights of the information owner. Therefore, information should be considered by the law as an object of property right together with traditional material ones.
In 1970-80s, lawyers from advanced foreign countries became interested in the problem of protecting computer information in a legal way. In 1970s, compact and comparatively cheap personal computers computerized economic and administrative activities and allowed many people to be connected to powerful information traffics. As a result, electronic computers were widely used in different spheres of social life (space researching, nuclear power engineering, defense) where their malfunctions could cause people’s deaths and great economic damages. In addition, electronic banks with personal information make an unauthorized access quite dangerous for human rights and freedoms.
After fixing subjects and objects of property right, any related law should regulate relations between them to protect the owner’s rights. Their regulation depends on the specific character of property right objects. Taking into consideration that information is an object of property right, the law should regulate relationships between subjects and objects of property right to prevent the violation of legal owners and users’ rights as well as an illegal processing, modifying, destroying or copying of information.
Ukraine protects its national interests in the information sphere by developing and realizing the related uniform politics; balancing a demand for free information exchange and allowable restrictions on its distribution; improving laws on information security; coordinating the corresponding activity of governmental authorities; protecting national information resources at the defense enterprises; developing telecommunication and information means; perfecting the informational structure of developing IT technologies; unifying means of searching, collecting, storing and analyzing information to join the global information infrastructure.
According to Ukraine’s normative and legal acts, the priority of national interests establishes the state policy of information security realized by implementing regulations indicated in the legislation, Concept of technical protection of information, program of developing informational protection and other projects.
Its main directions are as follows:
- Normative and legal maintenance;
- Improvement of current and development/adoption of new normative documents on technical protection of information;
- Organizational maintenance;
- Scientific-technical and production activities.
The national policy of informational protection should be realized in the following way:
- Development of corresponding normative and legal acts;
- Technical protection of information;
- Certification of home and foreign means of data technical protection;
- Improvement of the system of training appropriate technical experts.
The analysis of laws regulating social information relations in Ukraine allows asserting that our country takes necessary steps against computer crimes along with measures to stimulate the development of infrastructure on the base of the latest technologies. Ukraine’s President Decree “On measures to develop national global information network Internet and provide wide access to it in Ukraine” of July 31, 2000, as well as Chapter 16, Ukraine’s Penalty Code, “Crimes committed by using electronic computers, their systems and networks” can be cited as an example of it.
It can be concluded that the system of informational protection should be adequate to potential threats. Therefore, when planning it, the value of a particular piece of information and the circle of delinquent persons interested in obtaining it should be known.
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8. Ukraine’s law “On protection of information in automated systems” (Article 2).
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