L. Kyncl: Electronic Document Storage
ELECTRONIC DOCUMENT STORAGE:
LEGAL, TECHNICAL AND ECONOMIC ASPECTS
by
LIBOR KYNCL
The purpose of this text is to explain contemporary problems of electronic document
storage inside the e-government and e-justice in the Czech Republic. Main part of
our paper is dedicated to documents, internal documents, legal documents and to
ways of their regulation by the Czech law. There will be additional analysis about
documents in paper form, their disadvantages and life situations they are used by
Czech state power bodies in. In contrary, we will consider assets and risks of dema-
terialized documents which are digital documents having no material form. One doc-
ument may be in paper and digital form at the same time. We consider that to be
current important opportunity for the public administration and justice. In later
parts of the paper we will focus on assets, risks and on creator or creators of the doc-
uments. There will also be mentioned foreign experience in this area. Substantial
part is to analyze areas where we use dematerialized documents in the present legal
state. Czech law system already have legal institutes connected with electronic docu-
ments and their storage, for example electronic mark and digital signature. We will
also attend to perspectives of legal regulation into the future.
DOCUMENTS IN THEIR LEGAL SENSE OF THE WORD [1]
There are many different legal views on the concept “document” in Czech
law. We will try to discuss the most important ones.
Czech legal informatics system ASPI contains word “dokument“ (docu-
ment in the Czech language) in the Czech legislative texts many times.
While used in various lingual forms there are occurrences in 816 legally ef-
fective rules in the Czech Collection of Law and in 269 legally effective
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Masaryk University Journal of Law and Technology
treaties in the Czech Collection of International Treaties in the statutory text
on 10th November 2006.
We can ask ourselves whether the do