Beware of Section 43 of The Information Technology Act - 2000

What’s section 43 of The Information Technology Act,2000?

If any person without permission of the owner or any other person who is in charge of a computer, computer system or computer network,- accesses or secures access to such computer, computer system or computer networkdownloads, copies or extracts any data, computer data base information from such computer, computer system or computer network including information or data held or stored in any removable storage medium.

Introduces or causes to be introduced any computer contaminant or computer virus into any computer, computer system or computer network;

damages or causes to be damaged and computer, computer system or computer network, data, computer database or any other programmes residing in such computer, computer system or computer network;

disrupts or causes disruption of any computer, computer system or computer network;

denies or causes the denial of access to any person authorised to access any computer, computer system or computer network by any means;

provides any assistance to any person to facilitate access to a computer, computer system or computer network in contravention of the provisions of this Act, rules or regulations made thereunder;

charges the services availed of by a person to the account of another person by tampering with or manipulating any computer, computer system or compute network he shall be liable to pay damages by way of compensation not exceeding one crore rupees to the person so affected.

Explanation.-For the purposes of this section.- (i) “computer contaminant” means any set of computer instructions that are designed –

(a) to modify, destroy, record, transmit date or programme residing within a computer, computer system or computer network; or

(b) by any means to usurp the normal operation of the computer, compute system, or computer network;

(ii) “computer database” means a representation of information,

knowledge, facts, concepts or instructions in text, image, audio, video that are being prepared or have been prepare in a formalised manner or have been produced by a computer, computer system or computer network and are intended for use in a computer, computer system or computer network;

(iii) “computer virus” means any computer instruction, information, data or programme that destroys, damages, degrades adversely affects the performance of a computer resources or attaches itself to another itself to another computer resources and operates when a programme, date or instruction is executed or some other even takes place in that computer resource;

(iv) “damage” means to destroy, alter, delete, add, modify or re-arrange any computer resource by any means.

A perfect example is cited below to support my words-

A lady has violated Section 43 of The Information Technology Act,2000 and made unauthorized access to Gmail accounts of her husband and her father-in law, and unauthorisedly downloaded/forwarded/printed their emails and chat sessions with others, thus committing Identity. Theft by using the password belonging to others dishonestly, and violating the privacy of not only the Complainants, but also of others with whom these chat sessions were conducted. Given the fact that she gave the evidence only to Police and the Court, in the Dowry case lodged by her against her husband and in-laws, and did not make It widely public. Hence the Court ordered that she pay a token fine of Rupees One Hundred to the State Treasury.

Source : http://tkbsen.com