Legal Risk Management of Electronic Businesses - Essay Example

The legal concerns, issues, and risks identified in the article include the following: selling compliance, intellectual property, electronic marketing, information security, and data protection (Iqbal, Khan, & Naseer, 2013). The authors provided readers with the relevant regulations that would ensure the mitigation of the identified legal risks in each of the identified categories. For instance, for businesses that require the enforcement of patents, the “Patents Act 2004 protects the inventions through legal protection” (Iqbal, Khan, & Naseer, 2013, p. 5). Likewise, the Intellectual Property Office was noted to have the jurisdiction and governance for ensuring adherence to patent laws. Concurrently, the Data Protection Act of 1998 was revealed to be responsible for protecting the personal information of the public (Iqbal, Khan, & Naseer, 2013).

The legal issues which were identified and discussed affected electronic businesses in terms of the exposure to risks that could jeopardize the normal operations of the entities.  Aside from being potentially preponderant to legal or ethical complaints from customers and other stakeholders, unfamiliarity with legal laws, as well as ethical standards would expose the SMEs to different levels and degrees of risks. As emphasized, “the unauthorized alteration of contents of communication, malicious communication on behalf of an organization, etc. are some of the risks attached to information security and cause reputation damage, financial losses, loss of trust and loss of information to the company” (Iqbal, Khan, & Naseer, 2013, p. 7). As such, the recommendations proposed by the authors assist in mitigating these risks and protecting organizations from gross violations and legal sanctions. The realistic solutions include knowledge of e-businesses on legal regulations governing their respective products or services offered as well as compliance with the Data Protection Act of 1998 to abide by privacy and confidentiality laws. In addition, respective organizations must install data security systems to avoid security breaches. Finally, all contracts undertaken by the organizations should be legally binding and executory to protect the organization as well as the parties they enter into legal agreements with.