[BNM] Agreement to terms proof?

[Ali]

Hi,

Got a client who I developed an online application system for - only now (18 months on) their legal bods are coming back with some requirements relating to proof of agreement to terms. The applications contained some sensitive intellectual property/ideas. The client has agreed to destroy the unsuccessful ones upon awarding funds to winners. However they feel obligated to retain proof of agreement to the terms in case of any future claims of IPR infringement. This could mean dropping the IPR related fields, or exporting out the salient, non-IPR fields and dropping the table.

The form required acknowledgement of reading the terms and agreement to them before being submitted, I recorded the value of the radio buttons relating to the terms, a timestamp and IP address of the submission within the same table as the application itself.

Anyone familiar with record keeping of this sort? i.e. how to prove someone didn't just type the output in Word (well that wouldn't be hard to prove but you get what i mean) - are we talking about server logs (again, how to prove not typed in notepad) and retaining the database intact on the server? What if the server dies?

Ali