I hate to rain on the parade but this effort is badly misguided. The reason physical signatures work is not that a pen allows you to render subtle curves more easily than a mouse, but the fact that the laws of physics can be used to bind a physical signature to the thing being signed (because a physical signature can't easily be moved from one piece of paper to another).
The reason electronic signatures are broken is not that the signature doesn't look right, but the fact that nothing binds the signature to the thing being signed. Once I have your electronic signature it is trivial for me to transfer that signature to any document I like, so the presence of an electronic signature proves nothing. Hence, electronic signatures are useless. And good-looking electronic signatures are worse then useless precisely because they look so much like physical signatures but without the actual benefit that physical signatures provide. Nice curves don't make an electronic signature useful any more than an image of a shiny padlock makes a web page secure.
The ONLY way to sign documents electronically that has any actual utility in the face of disputes (which, if you think about it, is the only situation in which signatures matter) is with cryptographically secure digital signatures.
You misunderstand the purpose of signatures. Their main purpose is not identity verification, but rather solemnization. It is a formal act in which you acknowledge the document that you are signing. This is why you can sign with an X and it's still perfectly legal, even though an X is trivially forgeable. Conversely, this is why serious transactions require notarized signatures: with the notary, you are then able to establish identity.
This project is not strictly necessary, because an electronic signature can simply be a button, or a text field (I've seen both before). This is just as binding as a physical signature, which is to say that it demonstrates your intent to be bound, but does not actually establish your identity by itself. But it's merely overkill, not "useless".
There are about four elements to a contractual relationship: offer, acceptance, consideration, and the intent to establish a legal relationship. You need to have all four. Many people will, in loose conversation, throw out three of them (+), in such a way as to give their counterparty the impression that a contract exists. This is not always done in a malicious fashion -- in the rough and tumble of business negotiations sometimes one party thinks they're discussing options and another thinks they're discussing plans.
Signing physical contracts -- which is often not actually required in contract law (though it can be for certain transactions in certain jurisdictions) -- gives both parties an unambiguous, socially-ironclad touchstone that says We Are Engaged In Serious Business. If you're willing to sign something, you're willing to be bound, if not, you aren't.
+ "I was wondering if you gave any thought to the consulting proposal, for 2 weeks at $20k a week?" "We want to do it." has offer and consideration but the acceptance and intent to create a contract are ambiguous. It's entirely possible for one side of the negotiation to think "Sweet, it's on" and the other side to think "For God's sake, that was a pleasantry!"
Some people feel that certain online relationships would be improved by physical or physical-like contract signing, for the solemnization aspect. I've wrestled with this myself. For example, medical providers can't use Appointment Reminder without agreeing to a Business Associates Agreement. The BAA is not your bog-standard clickwrap ToS -- in event of a breach or HIPAA violation it could be at the center of a $X00,000 enforcement action. I currently force people to actually print and sign contracts rather than doing the clicky-clicky thing just to convey to them Yes This Is Official.
> There are about four elements to a contractual relationship: offer, acceptance, consideration, and the intent to establish a legal relationship. You need to have all four.
This is close, but the part about intent is not quite the way courts approach such questions under Anglo-American contract law. The issue of intent is subsumed in the issues of offer and acceptance. Importantly, intent is addressed from an objective perspective; the parties' subjective intentions generally don't matter. Generally speaking, if a person takes an action that, viewed objectively, looks like an offer or an acceptance, then the person's subjective intention is not relevant. [1]
An edge case is where one or both parties expressly state that they don't intend to be legally bound (for example, in a letter of intent). [2] That would normally be analyzed as, there was no offer, and/or no acceptance, because a reasonable person would not regard the parties as having assented to being bound.
Which brings us to:
> "We want to do it." has offer and consideration but the acceptance and intent to create a contract are ambiguous. It's entirely possible for one side of the negotiation to think "Sweet, it's on" and the other side to think "For God's sake, that was a pleasantry!"
The issue here would be simply whether, viewed objectively, there was an acceptance. My guess is that most lawyers and judges would say no -- that We want to do it was not an acceptance, but was a non-binding "invitation to treat" [3].
So what benefit does solemnization provide beyond its facilitating authentication of the agreement to the contract? How could you provide authentication in a way that doesn't confirm you are in serious business?
No. The screw case is when someone says: I pressed the button, but the document I was agreeing to was not the document that the plaintiff is presenting, it is this completely different document over here.
Correct, in the digital realm there is absolutely nothing that actually binds the .png of your signature to the document which you were supposedly "signing". That's a huge problem.
It shows you weren't just screwing around, basically. It removes the defense of "I didn't agree to that." (Versus "I didn't agree to that.")
Without that, the other party can do whatever they feel like to prove that the person they dealt with was you, but without something that actually indicates you agreed to be bound by the contract (typically a signature), it doesn't matter if they have your birth certificate and driver's license and DNA sample, you're not bound to anything.
One big contributor to the problem is the ESIGN Act - passed in 2000 it legitimized electronic signatures but failed to define them in any technical sense. Instead the law defines them as any "electronic sound, symbol, or process attached to or logically associated with a record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record."
The result has been that pretty much all "electronic signatures" are just fairy dust.
You are correct on the technical aspects- it's certainly trivial to take the digital signature and apply it to something the signer didn't actually see. But we're all already signing on the POS pin pad with a pen on a touchscreen.
It's going to take someone actually transporting a signature to another document and a resulting lawsuit to see the practical impact of accepting physical signatures with a digital medium.
> we're all already signing on the POS pin pad with a pen on a touchscreen
That's a little different because the pin pad might have an audit trail built in to it that would allow the merchant to prove (or at least provide evidence for) the provenance of the signature. I don't know if pin pads actually do this, but it's possible. With a signature that comes in as a stream of bits over the internet from some unknown source this is not possible even in principle.
And that is exactly the problem. People think it's the signature that matters because that is what they see. It isn't. What matters is that the signature provides some evidence about the intent of a particular person at a particular time. A physical signature on a physical document provides such evidence. An electronic signature does not and cannot.
BTW, even physical signatures have pitfalls. They bind only to the single sheet of paper they are actually on. This is the reason that on documents that actually matter they make you initial every page. Because without those initials it's trivial to swap one page of the document for another and it is impossible to tell which version you actually signed.
While your points are valid, they are not relevant in a legal sense (at least in the United States).
An electronic signature is as good as a paper signature under the ESign Act of 2000 if they follow this definition:
`electronic sound, symbol, or process attached to or logically associated with a record and executed or adopted by a person with the intent to sign the record.`
Hell, even sending the words "I accept" via Morse code over telegraph was considered a legal signature in the 19th century.
However, if there a dispute over the authenticity of the signature and found to be fraudulant, the courts have ruled that it's not a signature then.
The problem is not disputes over the authenticity of the signature. The problem is disputes over what that signature is connected to, i.e. disputes of the form: "Yes, that is my signature, but that is not the document I signed, this over here is the document that I signed." That is the reason that when you sign a physical document you sign the actual document, and not a blank piece of paper that you then attach to the document with a paper clip.
That's what cryptographic signatures are for ("digital signature" vs "electronic signature"). Hash the document and then sign the hash, to establish probabilistic certainty as to exactly what they signed.
I know so many people who already keep an image or PDF version of their digitized signature just to avoid the print+sign+scan hassle by pasting it into new docs.
I agree with this, but you can't dismiss the dissimilarity of these electronic "signatures" with the actual thing. Not being able to easily move the physical signature still doesn't prevent forgery. In case of disputes the signature is examined and compared with the one you produce. The thing I can write on his pad, with my best effort, looks nothing like my signature. It's possible I'm some kind of an outlier (I have a sample of one, me), but I doubt it.
I'm not sure it's just because of the mouse, though that makes things worse. Where I live we have smartcard IDs with biometric data on the chip. One of the things they record is the signature. It's done with a stylus and some kind of a touch sensitive screen (a really small one, which makes things worse). I took several shots but just couldn't write something that didn't look like a really bad fake of my signature. I pointed this out, but they were OK with it...
EDIT: Just to add, the lines really do look nice though (much better than what I have on my ID card, for example)!
You've missed the point. The problem is not the visual similarity of electronic and physical signatures (though that certainly doesn't help), the problem is that electronic signatures (not digital signatures -- two completely different things) are completely, utterly, irredeemably broken no matter what they look like. The visual aspects only matter insofar as so long as electronic signatures look bad people are less likely to take them seriously. But electronic signatures should never ever be taken seriously.
Oh, no, no, maybe I didn't come through clear -- I completely understand and agree with what you're saying here. My remark was more along the lines of: even IF electronic signatures had the physical feature of not being easy to move, they still shouldn't be taken seriously because they don't look the same (in my experience at least). I also assume here that overt visual likeness plays a significant role in validation, but IANACE (court expert) so I may be completely mistaken.
physical signatures are almost as useless as a digital signature... some people (at least 2) just escaped jail in Florida using faked judge signature ... http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/23/us/florida-officials-say-2... (everyone should switch from checks to bitcoins)
The reason electronic signatures are broken is not that the signature doesn't look right, but the fact that nothing binds the signature to the thing being signed. Once I have your electronic signature it is trivial for me to transfer that signature to any document I like, so the presence of an electronic signature proves nothing. Hence, electronic signatures are useless. And good-looking electronic signatures are worse then useless precisely because they look so much like physical signatures but without the actual benefit that physical signatures provide. Nice curves don't make an electronic signature useful any more than an image of a shiny padlock makes a web page secure.
The ONLY way to sign documents electronically that has any actual utility in the face of disputes (which, if you think about it, is the only situation in which signatures matter) is with cryptographically secure digital signatures.