[Discuss] need to set up fax-mail system

[mark at buttery.org (Shirley Márquez Dúlcey)]

On 8/27/2011 9:53 AM, Rich Pieri wrote:
> On 8/26/2011 11:40 PM, jk_xtblug at kinz.org wrote:
>> Thats true for you and I and this community, but the legal community
>> and the medical community still rely on faxes for "security".
>> (Or something.... )
>
> My understanding -- and this is incomplete information -- is that it
> falls down to the legal signature. A photocopy or facsimile of a
> document with a legal signature is considered to be a legal document for
> record keeping purposes. A digital-only scan of that document is not.
> This is a legal distinction, not a technical one.

And an absurd one in an age when a lot of faxes are sent from computers. 
A fax is actually easier to forge than a digital document because of its 
relatively low resolution; it's trivial to pass off a Photoshopped 
document as an original fax scan. Yet another case of the law not 
keeping up with technical reality.