Scientists hit with massive bills after speaking at COVID-19 ‘webinars’

In the US, it would probably be the case that someone in the lawyer's office is a notary and/or they're one themselves.

Solicitor certification of documents is a farce here in the UK. My mortgage company had me have a solicitor certify bank statements etc. I said I didn’t have paper copies. They said printed PDFs would to, and to get the solicitors to certify them. Madness.

In the US, notaries are often in law, accounting, banking, and real estate offices and do the notarization for little to no money. No church involved .

Note: in many states, banks must provide notary services to the public. You do not have to be a bank customer. Banks will try to ask you to sign up for an account “so you can make an appointment with the notary”, but you can decline - insist that you just want a document notarized.

They may give you the run around saying “the notary isn’t in today”, options here are ask them to tell you which branch you could visit where the notary is available, or what day and time is best that you’ll surely catch the notary. They will be uncomfortable about this pressuring but they are required to provide this service.

Or call a mobile notary who will come to you.

The UK and Ireland are uniquely countries in Europe that don’t have any form of national ID card. The UK was going to get (continental) EU style ID cards in 2008-2010 but this proved to be rather controversial at the time due to perceptions of government overreach and dragnet biometrics. Instead of just doing a simple ID card with just facial biometrics (like a passport), the whole project was scrapped. I don’t know why Ireland doesn’t have them but they have derogations from all the EU laws about it, though their passport card is essentially an EU ID card complete with chip.

> once you get a national ID or residence permit in some of them then the card will contain a chip with a certificate that can be used for public key crypto

H.Can you use them at home to sign lime a rent agreeement or something? What equipment do you use them with?

I don't think it's just retired lawyers. My uncle is a JP and hes a ferry captain. But he did have to so some kind of ceremony at the courts. I think he did it in order to be the family marriage celebrant and whatnot.

Some JPs take payment in the form of a box of beer or some small thing like that.

I had to do a one-off brokerage (where I don't have a personal representative) transfer fairly recently and, although they loosened up a bit during COVID, they were back to basically requiring me to show up at a brokerage branch in person. In theory, I could have gotten a Medallion Signature from my bank but it turned out they couldn't do it at my local branch and getting their central system to do it failed, so I just drove the 40 minutes or so to a brokerage branch.

This is the problem with things like account recovery. If you really want to minimize social engineering etc., you'll do something requiring a physical presence and various sorts of government issued ID and will probably cost money. And people won't like that. (And the companies won't like it because there's a lot of overhead.)

The solution is state-backed asymmetric cryptography, ideally with the private key on a hardware token that is protected by a pin. There would need to be a process for replacing a lost or stolen key, but that process could require physical presence.

I won't pay for it because I don't want to use Docusign.

I signed my mortgage on DocuSign, over a zoom call.

In the age of "deep fakes" recording the video of someone signing might not be enough.

So then every Docusign use would demand that you help the surveillance companies verify the files they have on you, where you used to live, etc? And then they would use this shoddy "verification" as evidence that the person who clicked accepted was really you? No thanks!

What actually needs to happen is that things like Docusign need to be contextualized and treated as the appropriate amount of evidence of a contract that they are. Which is to say not much, just like a piece of paper with a signature on it these days.

A "signed" Docusign is evidence that someone opened an email link and clicked a box from a certain IP. It does not prove that a specific person did this. It does not prove that the person who did this actually read, understood, and agreed with the words in the document. In fact, a Docusign that didn't allow marking up the document is itself evidence that the person in question was coerced into accepting unilateral boilerplate terms, rather than being able to make modifications.

Like many legacy systems in the US, the jankiness from using an antiquated system is actually preventing a much more draconian system that would develop if the abstraction was made solid (for a straightforward example, see "identity theft").

A signed document that isn't notarized is just a formality, in my opinion.

If you care enough to get it really signed, pay the notary.

I suppose it would allow one to question specific clauses, suggesting those are not part of the contract. That would of course be fraud.

Indeed, it is a pretty cool system, but every time I look into it I'm puzzled by the variety of costs for essentially the same thing. You can buy a cheapest personal certificate that is recognised as equivalent to a physical signature for contract signing for 50eur for 1 year. Or you can spend 500EUR for the same thing. Some come with a smart card, some don't. For some you get software that works offline, for some you can use open source signing software, for others you get nothing and you need to sign the documents via "their website". Some boast "notary approved" which means nothing. For things that require a notary like real estate transactions you still need a notary. My bank even sells "single use" certificates, good for 15 minutes for 5eur.

It's a nice convenience, but some of the costs are insane.

I think you have a significantly bigger burden of proof to prove the other party had accepted it if you signed it and returned it having amended it without mentioning those changes in the email, and it would be much less clear cut. If you mentioned “here it is with a few small changes”, and you got back an email that said “received”, even if they didn’t explicitly ok the changes or sign it, and you started working, I think you’d be on much firmer ground though.

There’ll be explicit case law but it’ll come down to “would a reasonable person think the changes to the contract had been accepted”

This is exactly what I do. I have an amendment on my contract about intellectual property being owned by the company changed from "while under employment" to "using company equipment in employed hours". They sent me two copies they had signed, I modified both with the change, signed it and scanned the contract.

The returned copy was accepted by HR via email (not sure if they ever read it or not)

What will be interesting is if this ever gets to be tested as not ever sheet in the contract was signed.

years ago I made a habit of making small changes to contracting agreements. The net results off the top of my head? most contracts sent were written for one side, not both sides, making some changes to defend my side simple self-defense (I didn't change the compensation terms); I only got the changes accepted two out of three times or so; when the tides of tech changed, I was the first to be left out.. it seems in hindsight that this was some kind of "larval state" for me.. I had to either get more authority in writing to become stable, or, be replaced by compliant, more desperate, more outsourced "talent" that could do specific tech work. As an intellectual, I went back to school, and lost the chance to embed and define authority in contractual relationships at the same time.

I inherit non-countersigned contracts frequently.

IANAL,but they're still enforceable, especially in the grandparent's situation where the grandparent's work product was accepted and they were paid. There are realms of contract law where signature compliance is more prescribed like probate.

> I'm also not really sure which situations an employment contract would really hurt you in tech besides maybe some IP stuff

In my first contract for a dev job:

- noncompete

- agreement to work for a minimum amount of time, while my employer could terminate me at will (I don't think this one was actually enforceable where I live, since I didn't get a signing bonus, but I didn't know that at the time)

- IP stuff

- agreement to arbitration for any disputes (and employer chooses the arbitrator of course)

I would probably dispute some of those now, but as at the time I was naive, fresh out of college. And even if I had pushed back, I didn't have much leverage. I had just moved, and had no money, I couldn't afford not to take the job.

Not that I necessarily agree with the person you’re responding to, but their point seems to be that this is a bad faith action, not that they will get in trouble for it and need to cover it up with further bad faith.

I would normally assume a year before a new employee is a net benefit; the first six months is mostly training. Someone who sticks around for less than two, we’d have been better off not hiring.

The signature is just a physical manifesting of assent. It's presence is indicative that you've agreed to what you're signing.

Signature comparison is a line of defense.

More broadly, There's a whole set of practices that assume a relationship. You scoff at signatures, but in their heyday, my local banker knew me and knew my signature and he could spot a general forgery or even unusual patterns. Every economic transaction I engaged in came with a relationship that helped mitigate fraud.

Even voting in the US today carries remnants of this. If you go to a small town to vote, you know the election workers and they know you. There's no need for an ID and there's no question of fraud. Everybody knows everybody. If you try to vote and nobody knows you, if you've got the paperwork, you'll get a smile and you'll vote, but you can bet your ballot is flagged for extra scrutiny afterwards.

We need more of this system in the modern world.

> I can draw literally any scraggles and they’ll accept it. Are they supposed to compare to the signature I put on my card?

This is because we have video recording, PIN input, card not present payments and lots of other ways to prove the cardholder approved the payment. That said, if you are a merchant and want lower fees by requiring signatures, make sure you compare signatures with the back of the card, and make damn sure the card is actually signed (no by looking at a driver's license). An unsigned card signature dispute almost always ends up costing the merchant.

>Are they supposed to compare to the signature I put on my card?

Probably historically; I think I've had it rarely in the distant past.

Signatures are fairly uncommon these days. And the places where you sign a pad you just swipe a finger and no one blinks an eye. I'd say it was just outmoded POS systems but I've seen it on newer systems too. It probably does, as someone else wrote, constitute a bit more assent than clicking a button does even if not much.

I haven't had to sign for a while now, but when that was more common, I just assumed it was for your own ease of verification, since you could see the signature alongside the transaction online/in-app and so if you see a transaction you don't remember, you can just check the signature to see if it's like what you typically do.

Not just in the US. McDonald's does the same here in Sweden, or at least they used to (but AFAIK only McDonald's, and no one else). Always found that weird.

This is a delightful nerd joke that I have decided to steal

Yeah, many conferences absolutely rely on company sponsorships to cover some or even most of their costs and many of those packages cover some sort of speaking slot among other things (booths, logos, swag bags, etc.). And some conferences have a lot of that sort of pay to play going on. But maybe because I'm used to it that seems different from a naked speaking fee situation.

Yes, true, there are 'pay for play' conferences but that's not the kind of conference that these scientists are normally approached for.

They likely put a binding arbitration clause into the initial contract for speaking.