I think that as soon as you digitally signs a credit card or debit card transaction, an image of your signature must be stored for legal purposes. (Rationale: if the signature is not stored, the company has no proof that you authorized the transaction. The signature may not be hashed over and then stored, because one person's signature may vary from day to day.) But a signature, stored digitally and then copied off an insecure server, could be worth a lot to an identity thief. So, in order to keep the transmitting company (read: the one with poor security) liable, one incorporates a copyright notice into their signature. After an identity theft incident involving one's digital signatures, one can then claim that the value of their signature is whatever costs they were not able to shed by other means. This provides an opening to claim copyright infringement against the responsible company.
Note that this wouldn't work for any other personal information, as information cannot itself be copyrighted.
I refer to U.S. laws.
Known problems with this idea: a purely digital signature isn't exactly useful. Identity thieves would probably have to print it off.
I agree
No opinion
I disagree
Add your comment
The very act of signing something makes it binding even if you didn't write your own name. Even if you sign it Napoleon. Even if you sign it Bugs Bunny. That's why the clerk is supposed to check your ID.
And as for the clerk trying to compare signatures from the back of a credit card, well, that's a good joke. Think about it. The space on the back of the card is 8mm tall and the sales slip lets you write as big as you want. No way to properly compare them. That and some signatures are nothing more than a scribble anyway. . . .
I write "See ID" on the back of the card so they ask to see my photo ID. It's amazing how many of them never look or ask.