Considering a fax is a print, I'm not sure what the printout comment is regarding.

The presence and non-exclusion of email/IP gateways show how backwards the law surrounding this is.

The law is not based on reality.

If I sent you a fax, and your fax machine (of whatever type) printed it out, that copy is legally as good as the original.

If I scan, then email, and you print it out, it is not legally as good as the original.

It doesn't matter if it makes sense, it is what it is.

I wouldn’t be quite so hard on the law here.

The law is based on precedent.

Fax was a new technology. For the first time a signed document could be sent over the wire in minutes, instead of having a courier go via train and take days. This is 100 years before computers were common.

When computers became common fax was already well established so there was no good reason to add a second exception.

I realize the fax predates POTS. But to say "When computers became common fax was already well established" is not really accurate. If you mean the 1970s (personal/home computer revolution), then no one had a fax machine at home back then. They just were not around.

Few offices had them, too -- teletypes were more common than fax machines, even though teletypes didnt do graphics like fax. I've read that police departments had fax machines for mug shots or maybe fingerprints, but i have no first-hand knowledge.

Anyway, I'm just trying to relate history to you from someone who was there. Wikipedia articles or retrospectives don't always get the nature of things right, even if they do get the hard facts like dates right.

Another example: you could say television was invented in the first decade of the 1900s. But they weren't household items until the 1950s, maybe late 1940s if you want to count NYC specifically.

Faxes date from just after the civil war area. They were in common usage for transmitting contracts by the 1880s. Photographic material by the 1920s

This equipment would have typically been installed at a telegraph office, not at the end user site, but the basic technology is far older than most people assume.

I know how old the technology is. You completely missed my point. They were NOT in coomon use even in the 1970s, even if am article on the internet claims it. I was there. Were you?

All hail to fax, but only now in the time of COVID-19 has the Supreme Court Of The United States accepted that telephones exist -- let alone as a means of communication, but also as a matter of legal deliberation.

I wonder how long it shall take to have electronic communication to be accepted, legally, as normal and standard across the board.

The point I was trying to make is that you sending the fax could be pdf > email > fax service > pots > fax service > email > pdf. The end result is a lower quality replication compared to email > email. There's no way the law says either the fact that it looks worse than the email or that someone can point to a contract that says it took place over pots makes the transmission more valuable.

Legally admissible digital signatures do exist, and you can infinitely photocopy a digitally signed document, though. Not so with fax, where a photocopy would count as a different document.

I have done this and am thankful for it.

I have gone so far as to have a digital copy of my analogue signature to drag-drop into an electronic document. And this has been accepted as legal. Courtroom legal. IRS legal. "Don't fuck with this" type of legal.

I hope this continues into the future.

> digital copy of my analogue signature to drag-drop into an electronic document

This will not work in Europe. You need proper public-key cryptosigning here. That was what I meant when I wrote "legally admissible digital signature". What you wrote is called "digitised signature" here, and would only be useful as a decorative sign.

What type of middleman blesses a "legally admissible digital signature"? This sounds like the same, if not a similar, rabbit hole folks in the US conjure up against voting machines.

You bless maths, not the middlemen in digital signatures. Electronic signature infrastructures are usually based on strong public key infrastructures, which I call them legally admissible digital signatures. The primary problem with electronic voting is no possible enforcement of no coercive force rule, not tallying security.

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electronic_signature to start.

> The primary problem with electronic voting is no possible enforcement of no coercive force rule, not tallying security.

How is this not "blessed by maths" as not in the previous problem?

Someone somewhere has to bless something, be it a valid vote or a valid digital signature. If there is a "Pope" for one, there should be a "Pope" for the other. Medical, government, religious ... someone somewhere must have a magic "I Bless This" magic wand and all henceforth below shall must be valid.

Why is the branch of "digital signature" considered "good" in this respect but "voting" not? "Medical" not"?

I viciously hate to say the term, yet ... this seems so "tri-cameral" ... and in terms of schizophrenia of illogic.

Coercive forces that cause vote buying cannot be stopped by mathematical axioms. Only way out is to adopt a permanent consensus-free self-stabilising social system, but that algorithm becomes the keystone of whole society then.