Canadian judge rules the thumbs up emoji counts as a contract agreement
Canadian judge rules the thumbs up emoji counts as a contract agreement
A Canadian judge has ruled that the popular “thumbs-up” emoji not only can be used as a contract agreement, but is just as valid as an actual signature.
👍
As usual, the headline completely misrepresents the story. Read the article, the context around this makes all the difference.
(The judge was right)
I talked to a lawyer friend of mine. In this case the judge was right, but this precedent will probably be appealed in the future if there are more damages at stake
Like if some idiot exec at a company thumbs up emojis a bad deal and loses $10M
IANAL so I don't know anything about anything. But I think the subtext of this story is one of the little guy getting comically screwed by a bigger player. If the South West Terminal, with capacity for 52000 tonnes of grain, wants to swing their dick on a farmer over 86 tonnes of undelivered grain, they'll find a way to win. Regardless of the law, going after a guy over a thumbs up emoji is audacious, at least.
I expect that in the future, someone in the farmer's position with bigger stakes and more money to play with will bring on a herd of lawyers to throw down a thousand esoteric & byzantine arguments & get a win. Maybe that's unfounded pessimism, I don't know. You just don't seem to hear stories about rich people taking Ls like this.
Dude shoulda used the 👀 emoji. Amateur.
This mildly surprised me, doesn't seem explicit enough, a thumbs up can represent having received but not necessarily agreed, strange new world
Judge considered their previous history of transactions where they had completed similar deals with short responses over text. "Yeah", "looks good", etc.
Thumbs up emoji would be considered a reasonable sign of acceptance given their previous history
It makes sense to me. Intent matters a lot in contract law. As long as it’s unambiguous that the parties intended to accept the contract, it shouldn’t really matter what form that acceptance takes.
That's a good point I hadn't considered and definitely puts it in perspective
This makes a ton more sense and also is missing from Engadget's summary of things which is annoying, is only in the linked article
If it's legally binding, maybe Google ought to remove it from the auto-send row? I mean, it was a joke that somebody would trip and fall and their pen would just accidentally sign their name, but that could actually happen with this!