On Fri, 4 Oct 2019 21:28, Stefan Claas said: > Well, I was wrong. It seems that the U.S. ESIGN Act is pretty relaxed > and does not need such strong requirements like in the EU.
The EU neither. Even the Qualifizierte Elektronische Signatur, introduced in Germany ages ago, is not anymore a requirement for the majority of transactions. In fact the Einfache Elektronische Signatur (i.e. your name below a email) is often sufficient. It is the same as with handwritten signatures - if it comes to a litigation the court decides and evaluates the entire circumstances. Having a government issued token (e.g. a qualified electronic signature) puts more trust into the validity of the signature but still allows the signer to repudiate the signature just by telling that the token was lost and the PIN was on an attached post-it. Recall that for VAT purposes (the major revenue source of almost countries) no signature on digital invoices is required. A EU decision once overturned the German requirement for a government issued qualified signature on invoices and thus was the tombstone for the qualified electronic signature (modulo that some companies try to keep them alive as their business model but that, along with their questionable legal hack, is a different story). It is a perfectly okay to allow a Fortgeschrittene Elektronische Signatur (advanced electronic sigature, i.e. S/MIME or OpenPGP) to replace a handwritten signature if that has been stated in contracts or constitutional documents or their bylaws. This prima facie evidence is nearly always sufficient unless notarial documents are anyway required. There is a lot of literature on that topic which can easily be found and studied. It is is not the topic of this technical mailing list, though. Salam-Shalom, Werner -- Die Gedanken sind frei. Ausnahmen regelt ein Bundesgesetz.
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