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Comment by codingdave | Hacker News Reader

> legally binding way to put signatures and timestamps on a PDF.

IANAL, but the idea that a signature is what makes a contract legally binding is not exactly true. It is a symbol of the acceptance of the contract, but legal acceptance can take many forms - so whether you use a service to signify acceptance, or just sign it using acrobat or Adobe's site, or even just a verbal agreement... those are all valid acceptance, legally speaking.

DocuSign's use case is not the signing, but the management of those documents and signatures - tracking which documents are sent, which have been read (yes, the doc owner can get notified when you even look at a Docusign document), which have been signed, and being able to store copies of signed docs. It is mostly for the companies sending you contracts, not for you as the signer.

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I really like it -- lots of legal documents I've signed over the past few years are in DocuSign. Which also means that I have easy storage for my _own_ documents. If I log in, I can see the lease I signed 3-4 years ago, the contract I signed last year, etc. etc.

Plus, yeah, you get to see if the other party signed, all the appropriate spots for signing are flagged, the entire audit trail of the document.

It's super convenient.

Also, it's cheap AF. A personal account is like $10-15 and a business account is $25-45. That's pocket change for the service you get.

EDIT: I've worked on document management software. Let me tell you that people will pay bank for document management -- without even the signing part. In any field.

>Also, it's cheap AF.

A pay as you go model would qualify as "cheap AF," but the subscription model can be extremely expensive on a per document basis if you need to do a couple a year.

Until it disappears. I tried to look at my job contract from 5.5 years ago and it no longer exists.

You should not rely on that. Make your own copies. I’ve had work contracts and other important documents all disappear due to custom retention policies.

DocuSign does not cost $10. It costs $10/month, which is waaaay more I’d spend to save past signed documents in the cloud.

It’d be “cheap” or an acceptable price if a signed document costed $5. Subscriptions are BS for occasional users.

For signing documents or accessing documents you signed you don’t have to pay anything.

If you are creating documents to be signed , 10-20$ is insignificant cost even if it is was per document.

Most contracts are worth lot more, most lawyers who draft these types of documents costs more . Sending a copy of a physical document by USPS for overnight delivery to couple of people will cost you that much.

For whatever reason with our enterprise license agreement, we pay $7/set of documents. I assumed it was flat fee, but nope.

We use DocuSign because FDA requires electronic signatures that follow 21 CFR Part 11. A lot of companies will be very hesitant to roll their own or claim compliance if the supplier (like DocuSign) doesn't claim it's compliant.

Back it up on Google Drive or similar.

The document can be deleted.

IANAL either, but this is correct as far as I know. Even verbal acceptance is legally binding. In fact, technically, everything you say is legally binding in some way or another.

But it's not about whether something is legally binding, it's how much deniability you might have in court, and what sort of evidence is admissible in the first place.

These legal hurdles make it easier to establish that someone accepted a contract based on a signature than based on spoken words. That's why a notary public or at least a witness is usually involved when you sign papers involving potentially large liabilities against yourself.

> Even verbal acceptance is legally binding

...for some contracts. A large number of jurisdictions require written contracts with signatures for contracts that meet various criteria. These rules are often based on or descended from the Statute of Frauds [1], so that gives a good idea of the general kind of contracts that usually have writing and signature requirements.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statute_of_frauds

Thanks! Good to know.

I've signed PDFs digitally overlaying a digital version in Preview on a Mac, which is free -- for all parties. I'm not sure how much more legal wiggle room there is for that version vs Docusign.

Either way, as noted, DocuSign has other features.

This is my favourite lifehack. I don't own a scanner and signing docs can be a pain without it.

A very few places will reject the Preview-signed copy, wanting a hand signature, but you can filter the pages a bit (tilt slightly, add noise) and they won't know the difference.

If you own a smartphone Adobe's free document scanner is quicker and easier to use than a normal scanner. And it's totally fine for legal documents like contracts (having just used it for that)

Print-to-pdf usually does the trick. (The issue is that the signature is done on a second layer, not any issue about noise.)

I’ve combined it with my scan app in black-and-white setting (no shades of grey) off my screen to pass German companies that don’t accept digital signatures. (It looks like the good old fax they love and can’t replace)

I remember an HN post of a program doing exactly this: adding your signature to a pdf and altering the document so that it looked liked a scanned one.

Could have been handy a while later but I never managed to find this post again... It was an open source program hosted on Github FWIW.

I remember a post like that too! Was it this?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23157408

Looks quite similar, thanks for sharing ! Appears I most probably remembered this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22811653 about Falsiscan!

I always use some random online service to do just that for making idiotic government agencies accept my digital bills.

You can also do it with Photopea albeit it's s bit harder

That’s clever but all the documents I recall not being able to e-sign also wanted me to return the original by post. At that point there’s not much point faking it I guess. Feels ridiculous though!

Seems ridiculously insecure for those to be accepted. Given just one signed document, a fraudster could copy and paste your signature into literally any number of other documents.

The whole industry is a farce. Nobody will do anything until after someone abuses it in a high profile case.

Well, there are actual signatures too, but that's just like the CA racket for ssl. Adobe and others just gatekeep it. And any type of key material is quite complex to manage, so it would never get widespread adoption even if it were free.

I agree but wet ink signatures can be forged too. Signatures alone do not make a transaction non-repudiable. High value deals are also secured by public notaries, agents, government clerks, and even attorneys.

They can do that anyway. They could simply scan your signature, scan the document, and copy-paste your signature onto it before printing it out. With printers being so high resolution, odds are nobody would notice the difference (if they were even paying attention enough in the first place.)

Parts of the US government will reject this and other types of electronic signatures including stylus/apple pencil type devices. The regulations explicitly mention 'wet-ink', and even when they allow copies, they have to be copies of wet-ink (i.e., scan of an actually signed doc). There are a lot of ass-backwards policies even in the west, and I can assure you that it's much worse in the rest of the world. So you really need to know where the document is going.

Print to tiff file then back to pdf. Boom. Looks like a scan.

As I understand it, it's actually the fact that docusign maintains a record in their database of you signing the document which makes the e-signature verifiable. That's what the hash in your docusign PDF refers to, so the signature can be verified, as opposed to _just_ having an image in a PDF.

Source: https://www.ecfr.gov/current/title-21/chapter-I/subchapter-A...

id also bet their backend does all kind of fingerprinting of who/what signs a document to ensure they can make the electronic signature defensible.

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