Funny you should ask.

Generally a signature is any mark by which a signee intends to be bound. In the old days, it could be an “X” or even in modern days an incomprehensible scribble. It was generally used as a hedge in support of a statute of frauds claim. Written by hand, there are some evidentiary tactics one can use to authenticate a signature—but in an electronic age, what do we have?

First, it has to be understood that a contract with a “real” written signature isn’t self-authenticating. A signature does not a contract make. Even though I have my own fancy, idiosyncratic signature, if I sign a contract with my non-dominant hand and misspell my name, I can still make that contract binding.

Therefore, there’s really no difference between me writing an “X” and calling it a signature and typing my name out on an electronic document. In either case, under oath, I would have to say, yes, I did sign it and mean to be bound by the agreement.

But then we shift back into the real world. Do I really think that a name typed into a word processing document binds me to a contract I want to sneak out of? No way!

Well, maybe. Few things in life are in a vacuum. So leading up to the digital signing of that DOC or RTF file, there’s a chain of e-mails that comprise negotiations. Then in the contract we specify:

Section 9(a)(i)(B) [T]he Licensor e-mails the Digitally Signed Agreement to the Journal from the Licensor’s E-mail Address to the Journal’s E-mail Address, both specified below, and within the body of the e-mail message types “I, [Licensor’s name], hereby accept the attached Publication Agreement.”

There, we have quadruple authentication: a signature on the electronic document, a chain of e-mails leading to an e-mail with an acceptance, a second typed signature in an e-mail, and then an “authenticating” e-mail address. If there’s author metadata in the document, then that’s just a bonus.

Taking a look at ALR: In Cloud Corp. v. Hasbro, Inc., the Seventh Circuit court of appeals ruled that the sender’s name in an e-mail was sufficient as a signature. 314 F.3d 289, 49 U.C.C. Rep. Serv. 2d 413 (7th Cir. 2002). Similarly, the First Circuit ruled in Roger Edwards, LLC v. Fiddes & Son, Ltd. that a chain of business e-mails referencing an agreement satisfied the statute of frauds requirement in Maine. 245 F. Supp. 2d 251 (D. Me. 2003). Part of the reasoning behind courts’ acceptance of electronic signatures hearkens back to days when a typed signature on a telegram was held sufficient for a contract. See Shattuck v. Klotzbach, 2001 WL 1839720 (Mass. Super. 2001).

So maybe this isn’t the *perfect* way of creating a contract. But it has to be weighed with the need for expediency in the larger system. And, as a law journal and forum, isn’t it part of our job to test the waters and try new things to push the edge of legal thinking and processes? BCIPTF was the first law journal to be completely on-line. We have to continue this tradition of keeping new and current in the face of uncertainty.

1. I, ___________________, hereby represent and affirm that I am, or am authorized to act on behalf of, the copyright holder[s] of the Article, that I submit the Article for publication to the Forum, and grant the Forum a perpetual, world-wide, sublicensable, irrevocable, non-exclusive license to publish the Article electronically on the Forum, to reprint the Article or portions thereof in any medium now in existence or later invented, to cause the Article to be republished on electronic legal research services, including but not limited to LEXIS and Westlaw, to excerpt from the Article, to distribute, reproduce, transmit, and display the Article, to add hypertext links, graphics, images, and formatting to the Article, and to use the author’s name and likeness in promoting the Forum.

2. The Licensor retains the right to register, in the Licensor’s name, the Licensor’s copyright in the Article with the appropriate governmental office.

3. The Forum agrees to include in its publication of the Article, a notice of the Licensor’s copyright ownership. Notice will be in the form, “© YYYY [Licensor's name]. Published with permission of the copyright holder.” Upon the Licensor’s request said notice will also include a restriction on use by guests to the Forum.

4. This agreement does not require that the Forum be the first publisher of the Article.

5. If, after the Forum’s publication of the Article, the Licensor subsequently causes the Article to be published, the Licensor agrees where reasonable to include or have included in such publication an acknowledgment in the following format: “Reprinted from the Intellectual Property and Technology Forum at Boston College Law School, YYYY B.C. Intell. Prop. & Tech. F. MMDDXX.” and, if published in electronic format, a hypertext link to the Forum. (YYYY B.C. Intell. Prop. & Tech. F. MMDDXX. is the chronological citation assigned the article during publication on the Forum.)

I wonder if we should just instead consider incorporating a Creative Commons license–or option for other licensing if appropriate–within our license? Here’s Lawrence Lessig’s quick take on the whole copyright licensing of law journal articles.

Law Review Articles Citing Legal Blogs

The blogger compiled a list of 75 blogs and ranked them by number of citations to them. Here are the top five:

• Sentencing Law and Policy (78)
• The Volokh Conspiracy (62)
• Balkinization (32)
• SCOTUS Blog (32)
• How Appealing (30)

If you look at the list, you’ll see that the BC Law IPTF Blog is not there. And, so, injustice continues to exist in this world.

Bluebook Citation to Wikipedia

Wikipedia cites the Harvard Journal of Law and Technology for this template:

[Signal] Wikipedia, [article], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/[article] [(optional other parenthetical)] (as of [date], [time] GMT).

The citation for this entry would be:

See Wikipedia, Bluebook, http://en.wikipeida.org/wiki/Bluebook (as of Aug. 30, 2006, 12:22 GMT).

To get the timestamp, you should use the latest revision date and time, obtainable by clicking on the “History” tab at the top of the entry’s web page. The first timestamp is the latest, and therefore the one you should use.

(I just anonymously edited the Bluebook entry, fixing some typos in the citation. )

For example:

http://www.barometersurveys.com/production/barsurv.nsf/vwAllNewsByDocID/F5482EED2EBEE435852570F1006D236F

Too long. And too ugly. So I wondered about URL shortening services, that would change that behemoth into something like this:

http://thnlnk.com/barometersurveys/080406/0000002145

Or perhaps better:

http://thnlnk.com/barometersurveys/SOX.and.Private.Companies/StE

Here, we have a URL that will permanently locate the underlying document, “citing” the domain name of the document (barometersurveys), as well as the date accessed (080406) or a description of what the link contains (“SOX and Private Companies”).

Has anyone else run into situations where URL shortening services were used and accepted or rejected?

Note: I wrote ThnLnk, and while there are other URL shortening services out there, ThnLnk is the best for many reasons besides being from my intellectual loins.

1. We want a system where we could easily post HTML versions of our articles.
2. We want the ability for the public to make comments on each article.
3. We want a blog.
4. We want something that someone not-so-technical could inherit and use. I.e., seamless upgrades, requiring little modification.

And that was about it.

I first thought that Wordpress would be an adequate CMS. But since it’s primarily a blogging tool, articles are posted and archived by the date they’re added by default. It takes a bit of hacking to get a page where the articles have dates other than the posting date and separate from announcements and other posts.

I looked into a Wiki, but the learning/adaptation curve is too steep. I looked at Drupal, but our host dropped it from Fantastico (the auto install tool), and it wasn’t customizable enough. The menu system was too static.

I never took too much of a liking to Joomla–I thought that their effort to find a happy medium between user-friendliness was too half-assed. But then I dug my heels in and started cranking away at understanding it, and I realized that it’s good enough for the job.

I also didn’t want to have multiple user accounts, so I was looking for an all-in-one CMS and blogging tool. But Wordpress is just too good. I also realized that normal users don’t need to access the journal CMS. We only need a few admin accounts to post articles and moderate comments. The bulk of our staff and membership can then get one account for Wordpress–they don’t have to touch Joomla.

It took me a while to find a good, clean template, but I found it. I got rid of most of the content Blocks (the Joomla term), keeping the “topmenu,” the “mainmenu,” and the “othermenu” (just the Administrator Login). No “newsflashes,” no news at all, and got rid of some other stuff.

Joomla creates  Categories and Sections; and I’m not quite clear on why there are two types. But if you create a Category called “Articles,” you also have to create a Section underneath that. This creates two clicks, where we only need one: just click to see articles! But I found that you can create a menu option for a Section, and that bypasses the first step of the hierarchy.

At that point, I realized that Joomla would work. I created Static Content pages for the Contact Us, the About, and the Submission Guidelines. (Joomla has a template for contact information, but I think it’s terrible. I just created our own page as separate Static Content.)

I’m happy with Joomla, when I didn’t think I would be. I like it because it’s Open Source, but also there’s a well-supported community to develop it. Therefore, I think it will be easy to upgrade and (relatively) easy to pass on. The rich text editor is very handy, as long as you’re using an up-to-date browser–it works fine with Firefox 1.5+ on Mac and PC.

So if you’re interested in trying to get your journal online, feel free to contact us and ask about how we got to where we are. Not that we’re the best, but at least it’s functional and practical for the revolving-door staff at a law school journal.