Thumbs up emoji counts as signature, Canadian judge says | Tech

The pronunciation costs a Canadian farmer 56,000 euros for not fulfilling a contract. Because that’s what the lawsuit was about: a grain buyer, Kent Mickleborough, spoke to farmer Chris Achter on the phone and then texted a photo of a contract to deliver tons of flax in November 2021. He asked the farmer in the message to ‘please confirm the flax contract’. Boer Achter responded with a thumbs up emoji.

But, so writes The Guardian, once it was November, the farmer did not deliver the flax. Meanwhile, prices for the crop had risen. The two disputed the meaning of the emoji, asking the court to rule on their disagreement. The grain buyer said in court that previous contracts had also been confirmed by text and suggested the emoji meant the farmer agreed to the terms of the contract.

According to the farmer, the emoji certainly did not have such a significant meaning. “Such an emoji is not a digital signature of a contract,” Boer Achter said in an affidavit. “I didn’t have time to look at the flax contract and just wanted to indicate that I received his text message.”

Judge Timothy Keene concludes in his verdict that the 👍 emoji is “a non-traditional means of signing a document.” “Nevertheless, under the circumstances, this was a valid way of conveying the intent of a ‘signature’,” he wrote.

The farmer’s lawyer fears that the thumbs-up emoji as a signature will “open the floodgates” for new interpretations of other emojis, including the “punch with the fist” and the handshaking gesture. That is not (yet) a point of concern for the court. Courts must take these kinds of developments in technology into account, says Keene in his judgment. “This seems to be the new reality in society and courts will have to be prepared for new challenges arising from the use of emojis and the like.”