Electronic Evidence: Characteristics and Features of Use

According to Part 1 of Art. 100 of the Civil Procedure Code (CPC) electronic evidence is information in an electronic (digital) form that contains information about the circumstances of the case including electronic documents (including text documents, graphic images, plans, photographs, videos and sound recordings, etc.), websites(pages), text, multimedia and voice messages, metadata, databases and other data in electronic form. Procedural law contains a non-exhaustive list of objects that can relate to the electronic evidence so they include any data in an electronic (digital) form stored on various media and on the Internet, in particular, in cloud environments.The characteristic features of electronic evidence are: 1) the formation as a result of purposeful human activity or system activity without human intervention in the process of data capture; 2) intangible nature caused by creation in electronic (digital) format; 3) the absence of a specifically identifiable material carrier for storing data in electronic (digital form); 4) the ability to reproduce and move unlimitedly while maintaining the authenticity of the information contained therein; 5) the need to use technical and software tools for the perception of information; 6) the presence of metadata that captures and encodes information related to the creation and use of the object and its characteristics.An original of electronic evidence is an object that contains the expressed information and metadata associated with its creation and use; a copy is an object that reproduces the expressed information of the original and can partially reproduce the original metadata and at the same time contains its own independent from the primary metadata. Thus, electronic evidence is characterized by the presence of their originals and electronic copies distinguished by their metadata.As it follows from the provisions of Art. 100 of the CPC, the rules of submission of electronic evidence are established in a manner similar to the rules of submission of written evidence. This mode does not fully comply with the particularities of electronic evidence since in many cases their copies are able to accurately and comprehensivelyconvey the content of the original. In addition, the submission of the original electronic evidence does not always have a practical need, and some evidence such as websites may not be submitted in original at all. The legal regulation of electronic evidence in civil proceedings requires some improvement.In particular, it is necessary to clarify the legal status of information from web archives and archived copies of messages, the possibility to use as evidence of video review of the site or page, the admissibility of screenshots as evidence in the case of failure to recover the content of deleted messages, admissible evidence to establish the content of information posted on a personal page on the social network.