Introduction: What Is Cyber Law, Its Need, and Its History in India

What is Cyber Law? Cyber Law (also called IT Law) is the branch of law that governs legal issues connected with computers, the internet, and cyberspace — including electronic commerce, digital contracts, electronic records and signatures, data protection, and cybercrime. It is not a wholly separate legal universe: ordinary contract law, company law, and criminal law all still apply when a transaction or a wrong happens online. Cyber Law specifically fills the gaps that older laws — written with paper documents and face-to-face dealings in mind — leave open once the same activity happens through a computer network instead.

Need for Cyber Law. The rapid growth of e-commerce, e-banking, and social media created real legal questions traditional law had no ready answer for: Is an email a valid "document"? Is a digital signature as legally valid as a handwritten one? Who is responsible when a customer's card details are stolen from a website? Cyber Law was needed to (i) give legal recognition to electronic records and electronic signatures so that online transactions carry the same legal weight as paper-based ones, (ii) regulate and facilitate e-commerce and e-governance, and (iii) define and penalise entirely new categories of wrongdoing — hacking, phishing, data theft, and the like — that simply could not exist before computers and networks did. …