Faxing is still big in Japan

Facsimile transmissions have all but disappeared from the American workplace over the past decade, but remain very common in Japan. Be sure not to overlook them if you are assigned to assist with an electronic production from a Japanese business. Small businesses compromise a very high percentage of companies in Japan, and a large number of private residences have fax machines. Faxing may have become adopted more widely in Japan because early word processing software did not allow for kanji characters to be entered easily.

The Japanese prefer the personal effect a handwritten communication can convey, and some use faxes as a way to avoid exposing their confidential information on the internet. Japanese business also favor using hanko stamps on paper documents.

Fax machines are found in convenience stores all over Japan. Both lunch orders and bank transactions are still done using faxes. The faxed document is typically reprinted on A4 paper.

Many fax machines run on Windows and can be used to simply scan documents as PDFs or JPEGs.

Outlook.com Data Lost After 2 Years of Inactivity

When performing electronic discovery for web based email accounts, keep in mind that a outlook.com account may become disabled if a user has not logged in for more than 2 years. After this period, may not be possible to recover the data for the account at all. Outlook reserves the right to delete the data.

See the services agreement posted here.

OneDrive accounts will be closed after more than one year of inactivity. After a user voluntarily closes their email account, Microsoft will still permit it to be reactivated for another 60 days.

Emojis and the Law

Here's more on the subject discussed in the Tip of the Night for December 21, 2019, "Your Recipient May Not See Your☺As You Do".

In 2018, a professor of law at the Santa Clara University School of Law, published a study focusing on how electronic productions may vary the appearance of emojis which are standardized in Unicode. Goldman, Eric, Emojis and the Law (2018). 93 Washington Law Review 1227 (2018), Santa Clara Univ. Legal Studies Research Paper, No. 2018-06, available at, https://ssrn.com/abstract=3133412 .

Goldman's study makes these key points:

1. Different platforms will interpret emojis differently, as Unicode emoji standardizations do not take designs into account. The original color and shape can be altered. In this example of how a cow emoji will be shown on different platforms, the Unicode-coded emoji is shown on the left - black & white and just an outline.

2. Emojis often contain subtle features which some users might not notice. Compare the Unicode “Smiling Face With Open Mouth & Smiling Eyes” emoji:

. . . with the "Smiling Face With Open Mouth & Cold Sweat” emoji.

3. Platforms often vary how an emoji with a fixed description appears in different versions of their software. See the evolution of the Microsoft grinning face emoji:

4. Users will assign very different meanings to emojis that appear differently on two platforms. For example, the Android "Grimacing Face” emoji got the reactions shown in orange on the below chart, but the Apple version of the "Grimacing Face” face emoji got the reactions shown in blue.