The Computer Related Crime Law was announced almost four months ago, however, there are many ambiguous points within it that are still being argued. Legal experts have suggested considering the intention of the law in the cases where the statement of meaning is questionable.
During a panel discussion on the Computer Related Crime Act: Confusing or Constructive, Nectec legal expert Surangkana Wayuparb said the law was a new area and thus there were teething problems.
The problem of enforcement creates confusion for software buyers; she raised the example of the distribution of hacking software which was against the law, but was acceptable if a company bought it to test their own system.
The law needs to consider intent as a primary concern, she said.
Meanwhile, she said, social networking Web sites, which are rapidly growing is popularity, raise issues about regulating content, as they can potentially be used as a source of defamation. "How should service providers manage them? There are risks for permission providers," she said.
According to Dol Bunnag, Civil Court judge of the Presidential of the Supreme Court, the law comprised many technical terms, for example "sniffing". How to define them in Thai and check whether they portrayed their original English meaning was the difficult part. The law has been defined, he said, through the definition of terms used within its wording, for example "key locker" or "service providers".
Article 20 refers to "blocking Web sites" which in Thai means to stop a site's content distribution, but the implications of this term were broader than just simply blocking access to a site, the judge said.
When there were problems with understanding the law, Dol said, two techniques were used to clarify--defining the terms used or looking at the intention of the law.
The final decision falls to the court's judgment. If a term's definition is ambiguous, then it is clarified by the intention of the law, the judge noted.
Mahanakorn University president Sujet Chantarang noted that since technology was advancing so rapidly, many articles thus needed to be defined.
People also should have a measure to protect their own rights, he said. "Understanding this law is sometimes difficult."
He also mentioned that the use of the word "unlawfully" in Article 5-10, had raised questions about what was specifically meant by the term.
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