"What Happens To My Facebook Profile When I Die?" : Legal Issues Around Transmission Of Digital Assets On Death

Lilian Edwards, Edina Harbinja
2013 Zenodo  
This chapter aims to explore some of the major legal issues pertaining to transmission of digital assets on death. "Digital assets" within this chapter are defined widely and not exclusively to include a huge range of intangible information goods associated with the online or digital world: including social network profiles e.g. on Facebook, Twitter, Google + or Linked In; emails, tweets, databases etc; in-game virtual assets (e.g., as bought, found or built in worlds such as Second Life, World
more » ... of Warcraft, Lineage, etc); digitised text, image, music or sound, such as video, film and e-book files; passwords to various accounts associated with provisions of digital goods and services, either as buyer, user or trader (e.g. to eBay, Amazon, Facebook, YouTube etc); domain names; 2D or 3D personality-related images or icons such as user icons on LiveJournal or avatars in Second Life; and not excluding the myriad types of digital assets emergent as commodities capable of being assigned worth (e.g. "zero day exploits" or bugs in software which antagonists can exploit[1]). In emerging legal discourse, disputes over digital assets on death can be usefully divided as related to either their pure economic value, or what might be called their dignitary, personal or non-economic value. Domain names, for example are an obvious example of an economic asset which may be crucial to the branding and thus the profitability of a business. In a family business, not only who inherits the domain name itself, but also who gets the email notifying of the upcoming need to re-register, may be controversial issues. Similarly many outlet businesses nowadays operate exclusively from eBay and, again, who inherits that account (i.e. the password and login), the money attached to the account, and any connected ongoing auctions will be a serious matter. Virtual assets in game worlds often represent the fruit of thousands of hours of labour (if game playing can be called labour[2]) and there is already a substantial ethical and [...]
doi:10.5281/zenodo.8375 fatcat:7okfqj5f65eb3fx3a4yldgxony