You went to law school and you don't see any the difference between forging someone else's signature on a document and encoding one's own authentic signature into a digital document file in the manner needed by the recipient?
You went to law school and you don't see any the difference between forging someone else's signature on a document and encoding one's own authentic signature into a digital document file in the manner needed by the recipient?
I do see a difference. I have said clearly there is a difference. You don’t see that the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of a signature is deliberate deception?
I’ll give a more concrete example. If you bill the government for Medicaid home health services they required an ink signature. And in fact it had to be black ink, no other color was acceptable. When I was building software for electronic visit verification it was actually a formal legal block and required several states passing law to make digital signature images legally acceptable. If I had used a library like this to make the document digital signature look like they had been analog at some point it would have been a crime.
So just because you think it’s reasonable doesn’t mean the act of misrepresenting the origin and nature of the signature isn’t illegal.
It's just that such cases come down to technical advice that applies to a specific legal environment (certain states you mention), whereas I'm personally more interested in looking at such situations from the ethics, identity, and authenticity perspectives.
That’s fine. I studied philosophy in undergrad and happy to debate those perspectives but I was making a legal argument.