[110] In this computer age the shift is from paper-less to paperless and hard copies of documents are now e-filed with trolleys of appeal records giving way to document stored in the cloud and retrievable in one’s computer with the necessary safeguards in place to vouch for the authenticity and integrity of documents e-filed and retrieved. One does not have to avoid copies like plague! In fact the distinction between an original and copies produced by a computer or subsequent copies of copies is now a distinction without a difference.
[111] Not having the digital camera or the memory card or basically the original is not a barrier to admissibility by virtue of the special provisions in s 90A of the Evidence Act 1950 specially crafted to cater for computer evidence. By and large the computer is neutral and the marvel of modern computer technology is such that it can record events accurately and be saved into some memory card or hard disk and be reproduced or downloaded into another device with no loss of accuracy and no compromise on its authenticity or integrity.
[112] In the light of the new versatile provisions put in place we must liberate ourselves from the technical clutches of a previous era where documents were understood to refer to that which can be touched and felt as in a piece of paper.
[113] Our lives would be immeasurably the poorer and truth would be more difficult to pursue and prove if computer evidence is rendered inadmissible by applying the old paradigms of a bygone era where an original was typewritten and copies were understood to be carbon-copies!
per Lee Swee Seng JCA
Dato’ Kanalingam Veluppillai v. Majlis Peguam Malaysia [2022] 2 MLRA 680 CA:
