[Discuss] transmitting legal documents

[bill at horne.net (Bill Horne)]

On 2/22/2015 12:51 PM, Tom Metro wrote:
> Jerry Feldman wrote:
>> Unfortunately fax machines are a legal way to send information. While
>> today many transactions are done by email, fax is the only legally
>> recognized way to send a document.
> It's true that there are industries that are holdouts for using fax
> (like doctors), and few companies are wise enough to adopt open
> encryption standards, like S/MIME (instead fording you to use web sites
> or other proprietary encryption for sending secure messages), but there
> is no legal necessity to use fax.

It may be coming to a point where it's not possible to send fax 
messages: many long-distance calls are done via VoIP, which doesn't 
always have fax compatibility, and many "local loop" lines are also 
changing over to VoIP, or similar technologies, and not all of those are 
compatible either.

It's true that the medical-care industry prefers fax over email, but I 
doubt they are holding out because of tradition: doctors have, after 
all, been using computerized medical records for over a decade. I 
suspect that it's a way to cut costs by requiring customers to deliver 
documents by hand, since few patients have fax machines at home, and 
demanding fax transmission instead of email saves the HMOs the costs of 
virus screening and/or remediation.

> When you say "legally recognized way" it really comes down to what is
> recognized by the law and the courts as a legitimate way to sign a legal
> document, and that was addressed by the ESIGN Act in 2000.

Despite verbiage that states simply typing my name on an online page 
constitutes a "signature", I doubt it's so. Unless there have been legal 
test of the practice, and applicable precedents are in place, I view 
"electronic signatures" as invalid without PKI. After all, the essence 
of a signature is that it's hard to forge, and electronic commerce needs 
the features PKI offers: verification, non-repudiation, and 
transactional granularity.

Bill

-- 
E. William Horne
339-364-8487