New Delaware Law Allows Users To Will Their Digital Assets To Their Descendants
Tuesday, August 19, 2014 - 10:54 AM
Right now, if you die, your digital assets are essentially
inaccessible, unless someone has your password. Facebook and other
services allow you to request "memorialization,"
which essentially preserves an account in amber, but it is a violation
of Facebook's TOS for someone to log into an account that isn't their
own. In the case of things like iTunes, the company has complete
discretion over what happens to the thousands of songs you've bought the
license to play. Yesterday Last week, the state of Delaware became the first to require companies to give heirs access to these digital assets, with the Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets and Digital Accounts Act.
Provided it appears in a person's will, heirs in Delaware will
now have access to social media accounts, blogs, iTunes, emails, and
cloud storage like Dropbox.
On the Media spoke to Suzanne Brown Walsh of the Uniform Law Commission in June about her attempts to get this law enacted across all 50 states.
This seems like a common sense updating of the law. Right now, when someone dies, especially in the case of a blog, if the family doesn't get access it just sits online forever, gathering spammy comments like digital weeds. Granting this access allows your family to preserve, or even curate your digital legacy. This gives families the ability to access old correspondence, photos, and other things that would be locked away forever were it not for this law. So if you trust your family enough to not posthumously embarrass you online, this law is a huge step forward.
On the Media spoke to Suzanne Brown Walsh of the Uniform Law Commission in June about her attempts to get this law enacted across all 50 states.
This seems like a common sense updating of the law. Right now, when someone dies, especially in the case of a blog, if the family doesn't get access it just sits online forever, gathering spammy comments like digital weeds. Granting this access allows your family to preserve, or even curate your digital legacy. This gives families the ability to access old correspondence, photos, and other things that would be locked away forever were it not for this law. So if you trust your family enough to not posthumously embarrass you online, this law is a huge step forward.
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