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Are You Being Served? Don't Open That Email!
An unnamed reader writes: "A federal appeals court has ruled that legal documents can be served by email.
Since the party had no physical address, the court ruled that email was a viable option.
So, before you open that next email, you might want to consider if it's something you might want to avoid! And it wouldn't be spam..."
I use hotmail for a reason :)
errr....umm...*whooosh* *whoosh* Is this thing on ?
Isn't it kinda easy to forge emails and say that they are from the government? And couldn't someone along the way simply alter it? At least with snail mail it's easier to determine if it's been tampered with....just my $0.02
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Until you can confirm the receipt beyond a reasonable doubt, I don't think this will become a widespread practice. How hard is it to forge a bounced message?
Anyway, undoubtedly if you do have a physical address, it will be used instead. The case mentioned in the article seems to be an isolated one.
Sig: What Happened To The Censorware Project (censorware.org)
Most of us have physical addresses, so this doesn't matter to the rest of us.
So, lets make the story more shrill, lets just infer that opening any email might be a binding legal document.
Sheesh!
It's a novel legal argument, that certianly has some problems, but generally used it's not, and most certainly won't become widely used either.
How about leaving sensationalism to the Weekly World News, the Sun or the National Inquirer, and just post stories without the whining "the sky is falling" prose?!
Cheers!
So I can legally send a notice to a spamming company that serves as legal notification if they do not list a phone number or physical address, and it will be backed by this precident.
I love it when a ruling can affect something intelligent, especially when the ruling itself isn't that smart.
) Human Kind Vs Human Creation
) It'd be interesting to see how many humans would survive to serve us.
Now hundreds of people are hiring lawyers and showing up in court on dates they were never expected for summons that were never issues.
There are reasons why papers must be served in person; so everyone on both sides knows it happened for real. Summons by regular mail is bad enough.
There is nothing so silly as other peoples traditions, and nothing so sacred as our own.
Its also conceivable that the sender could look at your mailserver's logs to see if you downloaded the message, but that doesn't necessarily prove that you have read it.
IANAL, but wouldn't downloading the message be enough proof of delivery. Just because you don't read the summons doesn't excuse you.
If an attorney servers me with papers, they have been delivered whether I read them or not.
I see a couple of problem-
The act of a mail user agent receiving the email, does not equate to the intended individual receiving it. Nor does an unauthenticated user. The only way this makes sense is if the intended recipient uses some form of biometric authentication.
I am making an assumption that the entity in question is in fact a human and not a virtual entity. As long as we are dealing with people, we should maintain the same high level of bioauthentication that we use today. Handing a subpoena to the identified individual relys on human based bioauthentication. That has been the legal standard. Not being able to find the person has not been an excuse to serve a subpoena without this level of bioauthentication. I don't believe that it is permissable to deliver a subpoena via the telephone.
I'm still waiting for a bioauthentication scheme as ubiquitous as human recognition...
-tpg
Hmm... I wonder what the implications of something like this are on auto responders. I use TMDA to autmotically respond to any emails that I get from people that I don't know. I wonder if an auto response constitutes being served.
Hmmm...
Key to financial independence: Spend less than you earn. Save and invest the difference. Do it for a long time.
1) In the "real world", you can serve legal papers by a couple of methods. Registered (return receipt) mail (or courier), local county Sheriff, an officer of the court. This provides that the person getting the papers is actually the person that should be getting the papers. On the Internet, the person reading the email may not necessarily be the person to contact for the serving of documents.
2) E-Mail (and its address) can be faked. Though in the "real world" it can as well, it's not as easy.
3) E-Mail can be intercepted and modified. This isn't even that tricky to do ... all you need is access to a mail server.
I could go on for a while here ... but let me just say that because the courts said that it can be done, doesn't mean that it should.
#include <std\disclaimers.h>
Karma? Karma? I don't need no stinkin' karma.
Well, nice try. I'd bet (pun intended) that the information from whois, before Harrah's took the domains, was probably more obtuse.
Harrah's operates the Rio; they probably took over the domains as part of the story.
My first thought was the same as yours, but the information seems to reflect the results of Harrah's legal actions.
Of course, even if the whois information isn't accurate, the money going to the sites had to go somewhere. Follow the money.
Some people have a way with words, and some people, um, thingy.
Not everything for which you may be summoned to court is a bad thing. My brother serves papers for various lawyers in NY, and every so often while visiting, I would go with him if he had a tricky paper to serve. On several occasions, the papers were "come to court and collect your inheiritance" type papers, where the people actually welcomed him in and offered food+drink.
Were the legal system to start contemplating e-Service of paperwork, these "warmfuzzy" services could be first served electronically, as their degree of repudiation ("I never got served") would be extremely low.
I'm curious why so many posters seem to think this is a Really Bad Thing, or a Really Stupid Thing. Are we all just eager to stay one step ahead of the law?
I for one think this is a Very Good Thing.
1) It's a big step toward legitimizing legal transactions online.This is something that needs to occur for the internet revolution to relaly take hold. The ability for people to make binding agreements virtually would usher in the next generation of e-business. Got an e-summons? Get an e-lawyer! If you can legally serve someone with an email, how long before you can represent someone online?
2) Of course, there are a lot of security issues to work though, but that's good to. Why? Jobs for geeks.
3) They're going to be able to serve a process against this scam artist. That's always nice.
Truth is, if you're actually being served a process, either someone bad is after you or you've done something wrong, like skip out on child support. Making virtual process serving possible doesn't make it easier to file lawsuits, it just makes it easier to let people know about them.
Howard Dean for president
It's a bad/stupid thing (depending on your perspective) because this ruling is effective with TODAY'S technology. That means that there won't necessarily be any evidence that the notice was really served, that it was secure, etc. Do you really trust POP/IMAP/HTTP enough for this purpose? Do you really? This probably has implications for contracts too. I would be very careful about this, or you'll get what you wish for (example below).
You: "Your honor, I am not bound by this contract because this email did not come from me. It was forged."
The judge: "Prove it."
You: [Blank stare.]
It would be pretty easy to drum up a whole stack of lawsuits based on forged mail. Hell, you could fake contracts of all sorts and pretend people owe you something in the hopes that they'll pay you something just to go away and not have to show up in court.
I doubt any self-respecting law firm is going to use this as their primary means of serving papers anyway, despite the ruling.
Also, think of this: if the party in question is so elusive that you are totally unable to serve them in person, then what real means of enforcement do you have in dragging them to court? So maybe you can get their site shut down? What if they're not the hosting company? What redress really occurred then?
No sir, I don't like it. Between this and e-voting, I smell real trouble.
Please mod this post only if you think others should/n't read this. I have enough ego^H^H^Hkarma. Thanks!
A con artist (read telecom provider or spam mailer) could send you an email authorizing them to suspend your anit-slam rights, and then trigger the authentication themselves by just making the HTTP request from another computer.
They'd have to prove that you, and only you, were capable of having knowledge or record of the authenticating URL. On the Internet, that means everything from certification that their software is bug-free and uncracked to certification that the packets weren't sniffed on the Internet to gaurantee that your employer doesn't archive your email as company policy. That reaches a point of impossibility after a while.
This means there'll be more demand for public key encryption. They'll need my public key (and they can't give me a private key...it might be intercepted on the Internet) to prove that the request I send to them really comes from me. This would have to happen by me sending a response encoded with my private key.
What's this Submit thingy do?
Can the U.S. serve someone outside the U.S.? Usually - it has treaties with most other nations exchanging that privilege. Granted, if you had a server in, say, Iraq, you'd probably be out of their jurisdiction.
When did US courts start taking much notice of the concept of "out of jurisdiction?
Then again, try finding a mail server in Iraq where locals won't dig up the cable and sell it for the copper.
Any Iraqi embassy is considered to be "in Iraq". Embassys are typically in urban areas where paved surfaces and police tend to discourage digging up telephone cables.