A Saskatchewan court rules emoji is just as valid as a signature and orders a farmer to pay $61,442 for unfulfilled contract
Justice Timothy Keene, who at one point used a dictionary.com definition of the symbol, lamented that the case “led the parties to a far flung search for the equivalent of the Rosetta Stone in cases from Israel, New York State and some tribunals in Canada, etc. to unearth what a 👍 emoji means”.
“This court readily acknowledges that a 👍 emoji is a non-traditional means to ‘sign’ a document but nevertheless under these circumstances this was a valid way to convey the two purposes of a ‘signature’,” he wrote.
What?! This is all kinds of bad. Considering the emoji has a wide range of uses, the intentionality of it is far more important than what it could be interpreted as. Someone is way out of their depth on this ruling.