Death ownership inheritance
Ownership and Digital Inheritance after Death
Author: Ashley George
Introduction
This project focuses on issues of ownership of personal digital content and its digital preservation in cases of deceased creators and owners. The most relevant subject headings used to retrieve the following resources were “digital preservation” and “copyright and digital preservation”. The databases that were searched for literature include Academic Search Complete, EBSCOhost, and JSTOR, with Academic Search Complete returning the most relevant results. Additional search terms were used with these databases to reveal additional items, and these included “legal issues in digital preservation,” “legal problems in digital preservation,” “death and digital preservation,” “digital legacy,” and “digital inheritance”. The search results using these terms also included irrelevant results, such as those on the topic of digital preservation of law. Many of these searches retrieved items focused on the issues of copyright, ownership, and licensing of digital preservation. This indicates that the biggest legal issues that occur in digital preservation usually involve copyright laws. The articles selected were those published between 2000-2020. Articles from most popular media such as newspapers and magazines were not examined.
Annotations
Antoine, the founder of a law practice in Beverly Hills, California, focuses on the topics of internet law, privacy rights, copyright laws, and intellectual property as it pertains to digital assets. It is explained that digital assets are stored by online services, accounts, and third-party service providers. Due to the terms of service involved in these accounts, it is not always clear what can happen to the data or who can access the data after the death of the user. This article is useful in providing a legal breakdown of what happens to your personal information according to terms of agreements made with service providers, who will own the information, and actions that can be taken by internet service providers and social media platforms according to state laws and federal statutory limitations.
The authors examine the topic of digital legacy, the importance of personal digital information to both families and historians, and the curation of current popular digital accounts like social media, digital music collections, emails, and documents. It is reasoned that these personal digital legacies are difficult to curate because of the large demand of the task and lack of programs and tools that can enable preservation of these types of information. This article serves to explain the purpose of preserving these particular forms of information and the current challenges in preserving and curating this type of information.
This article focuses on the planning of digital estates and making arrangements for our data in anticipation of death. The problematic nature of the digital estate is discussed, including how our next of kin can have difficulty accessing our accounts and information and how, at the same time, the companies like social media platforms have their own actions or inactions in regards to accounts belonging to deceased persons. There are options presented that can assist in dealing with these digital estates like services aimed towards digital estate planning and specific actions that beneficiaries can take after the information owner’s death. This source is helpful in explaining the difficulties and actors involved in a person’s digital estate along with giving options that are available to those actors.
Byrd showcases a new technology in the form of a website created by a university student and designed to manage and arrange personal digital assets like photos, videos, and documents. The program, My Digital Legacy, is explained in detail and includes functions for both the client, or legacy users, and beneficiaries, who can use access the digital assets after the legacy user’s death and utilize them according to after-death policies that the legacy user has set. These can include instructions like to delete specific accounts, emails, social media pages and profiles, or information or to give control to a specific person. This article shows a successful tool that has been developed to solve some issues in curating and preserving personal digital information and digital legacies.
The authors of this article conducted an incredibly useful and in-depth survey and analysis of digital systems meant to assist in the processes of digital legacy and remembrance after a person’s death. This survey and analysis is unique in that it examines not only the tool’s usefulness in managing the deceased’s information in terms of programs for storage, file transfer, and password vaults, but it also focuses on programs that assist the bereaved in mourning and remembrance with programs and functions like creating a memorial online. The paper analyzes a total of seventy-five systems and identifies four categories to define the different content and functionality of these technologies. This source is helpful in identifying the personal digital information management technologies available and the many different purposes these digital systems may need to meet.
This article details legal acts, including the Stored Communications Act, that can be applied to situations of digital inheritance and digital estate planning. The privacy of the deceased is weighed against the necessity of managing the deceased’s digital estate when the person’s records are increasingly more digital and less paper. This resource is useful as an example of legal action that has been taken involving a deceased person’s representatives having the ability to legally consent to the release of the person’s digital assets and a court ruling upholding the action of the representatives.
This chapter explores the many things that can happen to an individual’s personal digital information after death, including it being passed to a family member, being deleted or destroyed, or in some cases being continued by another individual. The author conducts interviews of individuals who are in possession of a deceased family member’s digital accounts to examine their experiences with the platforms and the actions the individuals took regarding the deceased’s digital assets. This article takes a different view of digital assets and digital inheritance by presenting a situation in which a deceased’s digital asset included a blog and specific issues are discussed that involve these types of digital assets which are located in public spaces on the internet where it is accessible by anyone.
Pfiester focuses on the topic of digital legacy as it relates to personal information management, security, and storage and the difficulty of shaping a digital legacy. Issues of digital legacy are discussed and largely attributed to reasons such as fragmentation of the information across platforms, password security and sharing, and the failure to back up cloud-based storage. The author is incredibly detailed in describing the research methods used. Because of the thorough explanation of data collection and the inclusion of interview questions, interested researchers could easily replicate the study. This article is useful as it contains research and an interview study on issues of data inheritance and digital legacy due to user actions that affect information security.
This article focuses on the topic of Digital memorabilia and the use of a deceased’s social media accounts as a tool of remembrance. Sudan provides an analysis of a potential model involving machine learning to predict which social media users would desire a digital memorial in the event of their death. The model would make these predictions based on reliable and easily accessible information like the age and amount of access and posting and individual makes to their social media profile. The author has conducted through research and presents an extensive literature review supporting the potential for use of this model. This article serves as an example of research that is currently underway in the areas of digital asset and digital legacy.
Waagstein explores the knowledge of the idea of digital legacy and the preservation of personal information through a study conducted by interview of people who are described as death aware individuals. The subjects of the interview are a rather niche area, with the author having chosen to interview hospice employees and terminally ill patients. The author gives in-depth details of the interview process used in the study, which is useful for researchers who would like to replicate the study. Also included is the respondent answers to the interview questions, which emphasizes even further the findings of the study. This article is helpful in defining digital inheritance and digital legacy and useful in demonstrating the baseline of knowledge that exists of the concept of digital legacy and the preservation of personal information in specific individuals.
