Britain's 400 Years of Cyber Law

corbettw writes "There's a news piece in The Register this morning about a British high court ruling about email signatures, and whether they constitute binding contracts. Apparently, the 1677 Statute of Frauds dictates what constitutes a contract, so an email with a disclaimer in the sig could qualify under the language of the statute. Since the statute predates the Constitution of the U.S., a clever lawyer could argue it applies here equally. Maybe there's some truth to the Internet joke 'take off every sig for great justice!'"

Comments

Confusion again

[slavemowgli]

Editors, RTFA. This is not about email signatures in the sense of the things people like to put after the "-- " at the end of their emails to add a personal touch; it's about regular signatures (signing your name), and it's about the fact that the LACK of a name or signature in an email means that an email CANNOT be a valid "written offer".

The only thing this means is that if you include your name in your signature (the email signature again, i.e., the part after the "-- "), whatever you wrote in your email can be treated the same way as something you wrote in a regular letter that you signed with your name.

But that's neither surprising nor worrying - quite the opposite. The implicit statement in the story summary that the disclaimers some companies like to put into emails could somehow constitute a valid contract is a big, fat piece of Slash-FUD.

Speaking of which, I propose the term "Slash-FUD" for intentional FUD in and intentionally misleading summaries and headlines of Slashdot stories - the problem seems to have grown so large in recent years that I think it deserves a special name. Death to Slash-FUD! Let that be our battle cry.

Re:Confusion again

[Bogtha]

Exactly. It seems Zonk either didn't actually read the article before approving it, or read it but didn't understand one word of it.

Pretend for a second that this comment was an email, that I was making an offer of some sort, and Bogtha was my real name. The fact that 'by Bogtha' above my comment does not mean that I've "signed" the "contract". The fact that 'Bogtha' appears at the bottom, as part of the comment and not part of the meta-data, means that I've "signed" the "contract".

In essence, a British law defines the rules by which you can consider a document to be signed. A judge looked at a case involving an email, and decided that according to that law, a From header doesn't count, but a name at the bottom does.

It's really not that interesting and bears little resemblance to what is described in the summary. You can read the original law here.

Re:I am not a lawyer...

[Alomex]

That is exactly what the constitution authors wanted. The consitution was written in English, using the English legal tradition and standard English meanings. When they wrote the word "judge" the meant a judge as understood in the british system. When they wrote the word trial, they meant a trial as understood in the british system.

In other words, every unstated assumption is to be resolved using the customs, practices and semantics of the day, which were, lo-and-behold the British customs. Particularly those rights that are not explicitly stated, but not to be construed as non-existent, as per the first amendment.