Email, a Legally Binding Contract?

slashrot writes "Boston.com has a story on a dispute between a home buyer and seller in which they agreed on terms in a series of email messages. Superior court judge Ernest B. Murphy decided that even though these messages only contain typewritten names instead of signatures, they still constitute a binding contract. It's said to be a first in Massachusetts." The particulary look to me like a home seller trying to weasel out of a deal, but the ramifications of the decision are substantial. This is really worth a read.

Comments

Re:What's next, a handshake? Pinky-swear?

[AgTiger]

As the chain of emails grows, the liklihood of one or both of the parties' communication being faked diminishes quickly.

When you send an email, you can fake the headers, but if you have repeated two way communication, including quoted material, it's obvious you have a communication between two verifiable email addresses.

The questions then become:

1. Do the email addresses track back to the individuals in question?

2. Did the parties involved in the dispute engage in this conversation together, or not?

3. Could someone else have had complete send/receive control of the email account in question at the time over the time of the disputed conversation? (Man in the middle attack possibly?)

Claiming one did not send emails when one did is a dangerous game when testimony under oath comes into play.

What we have is a case of a "verbal" contract, though with written transcription as evidence.

The judge may be breaking some interesting ground with this decision, but I don't think he's too far off the mark.

And yes, digital verifiable signatures would be better. :-)

Re:Did they agree that the email was real?

[stripes]

E-mail has reciept notification. In this case the sender of an e-mail recieves an e-mail telling when the sent e-mail was recieved.

Optional, and I think seldom supported. Definitely not on by default in sendmail. Just as importantly the receipt could be forged, so it isn't real useful.

If the reciever of the e-mail edited the mail the date and time at which the file was last edited will be different than the time and date it was recieved

Many (not all) systems use one large file for each mail folder. The one I used that didn't (MH) still marked up the file and lost the original time stamp (plus one can use "touch" to alter that as well).

[editing the mail] is now, just as illegal as editing a contract without the other partys' consent

Yes it is illegal, and immoral, but it is very hard to prove which party did it! If the two of us are in dispute, how could the court know which of is has the invalid document? In this country they will not just jail us both, nor will they pick at random. You need a lot stronger case then the one that proves at least one of us, but not which one of us forged the mail!

Also If you send an e-mail you keep a copy of it in your sent folder. If it doesn't match what the other guy's got, then hoo hah!

Of corse it doesn't match! The problem is proving which (if any!) was unedited! Is the "contract" saying $1.86mil or $1.94mil the real one?

Nobody will be able to get away with using vi to get millions of dollars.

Nobody will get away with an obviously unreasonable price, but one can claim the price was 10% or 20% higher (or lower) then the real one. You may not get that price, but you may well be able to get out of the "contract" by claiming you agreed to something different then what the other guy has.