A grain farmer was charged $92,500 for sending a ‘thumbs up’ emoji.
A Canadian farmer has been ordered to pay $82,000 in Canadian dollars – $92,500 in Australian dollars – after a judge ruled that a ‘thumbs up’ emoji he sent legally confirmed a grain transaction.
The Court of King’s Bench in the Canadian province of Saskatchewan received information that in March 2021, Kent Mickleborough, who was looking to buy flax, sent messages to a number of producers.
Farmer Chris Achter responded, and Mickleborough spoke to him over the phone. Mickleborough then drafted up a contract in which South West Terminal, the company he worked for, offered to buy 86 tonnes of flax for delivery in November.
Mickleborough signed the contract and sent a photo of it to Achter along with the text message: “Please confirm flax contract.”
Achter responded with a ‘thumbs up’ emoji, but the flax wasn’t delivered.
In an affidavit, Achter said that the thumbs up reaction was meant to signify that he had received the contract and “understood that the complete contract would follow by fax or email” for his review and signature.
“I deny that he accepted the thumbs-up emoji as a digital signature of the incomplete contract,” Achter said in an affidavit. “I did not have time to review the Flax Contract and merely wanted to indicate that I did receive his text message.”
South West Terminal then argued that the emoji had implied that Achter had accepted the contract, and Mickleborough stated in an affidavit that he had previously had transactions with Achter’s company “by having Chris execute the contract by text message”.
Justice Timothy Keene wrote in his summary judgement that the case “led 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 (thumbs up) emoji means.”
But Keene ended up ruling in favour of South West Terminal.
“This court readily acknowledges that a (thumbs up) 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’,” Keene wrote.
Achter’s legal team argued that allowing a ‘thumbs up’ emoji to act as a serious contractual acceptance would “open the flood gates” to new legal interpretations of other emojis.
However, Keene ignored these concerns, writing, “This Court cannot (nor should it) attempt to stem the tide of technology and common usage – this appears to be the new reality in Canadian society and courts will have to be ready to meet the new challenges that may arise from the use of emojis and the like.”
