🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Fm3VX2w163w@phoenix.com> stanley@phoenix.com (John Stanley) writes:

>   Ok. Give me a copy of your signature, and I will print up a zillion
>copies of a letter saying your product is now 50% off, or free, or
>any wacky thing I want. I will let YOU deal with the irate customers
>who call and want you to honor the offer YOU signed.

>   Forgery is an issue. It might not be an issue now, but say you
>fire the fellow who happened to make a copy of your signature.

Well, the recipients of the zillion letters wouldn't know my
signature from anything else, so you might as well forge it if
you're going to do that.

As I understand forgery (and I don't, very well, other than having
had someone steal checks from me and forge them a long time ago),
a signature is only your signature if you say it is.  That is, if
I have a proxy sign something, I can later claim that it's my
signature, even if it's obviously not, and there's no forgery
involved.  It's tricky.  That's why they have witnesses and notaries
public for things that really matter, so you can't claim later that
it isn't your signature.

Anyway, given that it's trivial to take a real signed letter and
digitize it, no matter whose signature is on it, it isn't terribly
risky to digitize your own signature and use it for your own form
letters.  If someone wants to forge your signature, they're going
to forge your signature, but it's a felony no matter how you slice
it, and the small matter of who digitized it is not likely to bear
very heavily on the matter.

I'm no lawyer, but I just don't think that a great deal of paranoia
is in order in a case like this.  As the original poster pointed
out, it saves them lots of time and money to be able to print the
signature on the page with PostScript instead of a second pass
through a photocopier, and forgery is, let's say, a minor issue, not
a non-issue.

-- 
 Glenn Reid				RightBrain Software
 glenn@heaven.woodside.ca.us		NeXT/PostScript developers
 ..{adobe,next}!heaven!glenn		415-851-1785 (fax 851-1470)