Electronic commerce and the concept of a paperless office are fast becoming established facts of life with the rapid development of the Internet.
A typical international trade transaction generates significant quantities of paper-based trade document...
Electronic commerce and the concept of a paperless office are fast becoming established facts of life with the rapid development of the Internet.
A typical international trade transaction generates significant quantities of paper-based trade documents. One such document is the bill of lading. An estimate by the United Nations of the cost of using paper for all aspects of an international transaction exceeds US$420 billion. In the recent past, there have been a number of attempts to develop an electronic bill of lading which can reduce costs and increase speed. With this in mind, the Committee Maritime International published the CMI Rules for Electronic Bills of lading in 1991.
However, electronic bills of lading have not received the full support and confidence of all the participants in the international trade transactions. There have been concerns about security and the authenticity of electronic bills of lading. Especially, it has proved difficult to develop and electronic document which has the function of transferring ownership of goods as a paper bill of lading.
Bolero project solves these problems. The Bolero project which has received the backing of the European Union, is jointly owned by the Through Transport Mutual Insurance Association (TT Club) and the Society for Worldwide Inter Bank Financial Telecommunications (SWIFT). The results of Bolero project have set up an electronic title registry for bills of lading, which will co-ordinate the change of ownership title of goods in transit. The bolero.net achieved to resolve the issues by a robust set of contractual provisions binding on all users of the Rulebook. And the Bolero electronic bill of lading achieves information security by means of digital signature.
This paper aims to review operations of the Bolero electronic bill of lading and find legal and practical problems. Accordingly I suggest the direction the utilization of Bolero electronic bill of lading as follows:
First, the Bolero electronic bill of lading requires that it should follow the English law as the governing law and include the United States Maritime Goods Act. That is somewhat ambiguous and judged on inconsistency in the content of the Rulebook. Therefore, it is necessary to investigate its potential users in preparation for the increases of its users, accommodate their interests, and also make the governing provisons in the Rulebook that may be satisfied and be agreed by many users through several trials and errors.
Secondly, the Bolero electronic bill of lading is based on the CMI Rules for electronic bills of lading in 1990. However, the CMI Rules operational concept is the carrier registry system. Therefore, the carrier registry system needs to be replaced by a central registry system.
Thirdly, it needs to build up the global electronic trade network to improve utilization of the Bolero electronic bill of lading. It may be solved by maintaining the cooperative relationship with the trade communication networks in a considerable scale built-up in the countries in the world.
Fourthly, the liability in errors or defaults in operating central date registry of Bolero International Limited is limited to US$100,000. The amount is not sufficient to the many cargo owners to cover the damages. If the users of Bolero electronic bill of lading can not be indemnified for their damages caused by the service provider's mistake, it is difficult to use the Bolero electronic bill of lading in practice.
Therefore, the service provider should more clarify the responsibilities among the parties, provide the relevant data with which the depth and frequency of damages can be examined in case the service providing entities are responsible, and make their utmost effort to prevent such problems.