Utah Senator Lyle W. Hillyard (R) will introduce a bill in January 2006 to repeal the Utah Digital Signature Act, which has never been used, a member of the Utah legislature told BNA Dec. 9.

Douglas G. Aagard, the House Chair of the Government Operations Interim Committee, said that the committee had unanimously moved to adopt the "Repeal of Utah Digital Signature Act" as a committee-recommended bill.

When Utah passed its Digital Signature Act in February 1995, it was on the "cutting edge" of electronic commerce, Aagard said, but the nation and digital signature technology moved in a different direction, so the act no longer serves a purpose today. "It just confuses people," said Aagard. "Why have it?"

The Electronic Signatures in Global and National Commerce Act of 2000, 15 U.S.C. §7001 et seq, or the E-SIGN Act, together with the 1999 Uniform Electronic Transactions Act, preempted Utah's technology-specific law with technology-neutral statutes.

Utah was among the first states to adopt UETA (6 ECLR 118, 2/7/01). UETA provided four guarantees: first, that a record or signature could not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because it was in electronic form. Secondly, a contract could not be denied legal effect or enforceability solely because an electronic record was used in its formation. Thirdly, any law that required a writing would be satisfied by an electronic record. And finally, any signature requirement in the law was met if the signature was electronic.

PKI Digital Signature System: RIP.

Unlike these general guarantees of UETA, the Utah bill rested on a specific technology: a public key infrastructure (PKI) system that was never widely adopted. Under PKI, signatories were required to have or download a digital "key" that would serve as their identifier. A trusted third party was required to vouch for signers' identities and for their relationship to their keys. It was not that different from a bank identifying its customers and vouching for their creditworthiness, or allowing individuals to withdraw funds using an ATM card, but the PKI system was "cumbersome," said Aagard.

Utah modified its law in 2000 to no longer require the state's Division of Corporations and Commercial Code to be a certification authority for digital signatures (5 ECLR 113, 2/2/00), but still no one registered as a certification authority. Without such a trusted third party, the PKI system could not function.

The bill to repeal Utah's Digital Signature Act. is not yet numbered. Utah's legislature is scheduled to reconvene January 16, 2006.

By Wendy Leibowitz