Conroe Criminal Defense Attorney - Texas Rules of Evidence Series - RULE 1001
Conroe Criminal Defense Attorney - Brian Foley - Board Certified in Criminal Law - Texas Rules of Evidence Rule 1001
Rule 1001 of the Texas Rules of Evidence is a definitions rule for Article 10 which covers the contents of writings, recordings, and photographs.
So what is a writing? A "writing" consists of letters, words, numbers, or their equivalent set down in any form. Egyptian hieroglyphs? You bet. The Rosetta stone? Yup! Any format where some human tries to convey meaning in a way that is encoded through symbols.
A "recording" is letters, words, numbers or their equivalent recorded in any manner. This definition is kind of silly. The only difference between a writing and a recording is that a writing is "set down" and a recording is "recorded." There might as well not be a difference.
A "photograph" means a photographic image or its equivalent stored in any form. This means that digital photos stored on a flash drive would count as a photo. Vector images that store dimension which computer programs can turn into images of various sizes also would count.
An "original" of a writing or recording means the writing or recording itself or any counterpart intended to have the same effect by the person who executed or issued it. For electronically stored information, "original" means any printout - or other output readable by sight - if it accurately reflects the information.
An "original" of a photograph includes the negative or a print from it.
A "duplicate" means a counterpart produced by a mechanical, photographic, chemical, electronic, or other equivalent process or technique that accurately reproduces the original.
You can tell these rules were created before the expansive use of digital images, storage, documents and the block chain. Under the rules of evidence a printout or other output readable by sight if it accurately reflects the information could serve as an original for an NFT. NFTs are non fungible tokens and are part of the block chain technology which allows for precise identification of individual digital products and the transaction history of transfers of those digital products.
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