Writing your signature in Microsoft Paint

Factual Questions
1

I’m not seeking legal advice. This is all in the past.

I made some free media. A German magazine wanted to put it on some DVDs in its next issue. I told them it’s OK, all I ask is they give me credit as its creator. Then they give me this form (through e-mail, mind you) and tell me to fill it out and also put my signature on it…using Microsoft Paint.

Now, I don’t really care either way. I went ahead and humored them since they seemed paranoid about it. But honestly, that sounds pretty stupid. How could that possibly be in any way legally binding?

What say you?

2

FWIW IANAL IMO a signatures carries a lot of weight in a contract. It does not have to be original, we used faxed signatures all the time to put contracts into force. I do not know why It had to be made in Microsoft paint?

3

Any signature will do. Doesn’t have to be manual, as with Paint. It can be scanned, if it’s presented as your own. That’s what I use for all my billing. I sign in ink for contracts, then fax. Not much better.

For UPS/FedEx deliveries, and at many stores now you can sign for credit purchases with a jerky stylus on a low-res touch screen. That’s official, and about the same as Paint.

4

The one or two times I have used the UPS (or Macy’s) type stylus, it resulted in a signature that looked I had signed it with the pen jammed up my ass. Not one letter was legible, and my signature usually has all letters legible. I don’t see how this would help at all in a fraud case or something like that- my illegible scrawl vs. someone elses?

5

Our CFO does not sign every check. We have a digital copy of his signature that is part of the check printing form software.

6

I’m not sure if this is what mstay is asking, but here’s a related question:

Signing with a stylus will at least result in a reasonable approximation of the signature one makes with a pen. But whenever I’ve tried to recreate that design by pushing a mouse, I’ve failed miserably. Perhaps the OP was asking how a signature in Paint can be binding, seeing as how it looks nothing like the person’s regular signature.

One response to this might be for the person to write his signature on paper, scan it, and save it in a file format which Paint will recognize. (I don’t have a fax machine, but Win XP does allow me to create documents in Word and then fax them out directly, and I have a tiny Signature.JPG file which I paste into it.)

But I’m guessing that the form which mstay needed to fill out actually had Paint involved somehow, so that pasting a signature graphic would not have worked.