Cloud computing after death

Now if there is one thing that our great grandparents need not worry about when they died was whether they had any digital data to pass down to their descendants – these days, with so many of us having our lives inter-twined in the computer world, what will happen to our blogs, websites, and digital information when we pass on? To date, laws in the US as well as other countries have proved to be rather vague where the fate of digital rights to online accounts after death are concerned – which might lead to extremely complicated legal processors amongst the survivors who want to access the online services of the deceased.

Legal experts have yet to come to an agreement as to who owns what in the internet “cloud”, and hence some service provides decided to terminate the account of a deceased person. As for online photo albums, “those photos are yours and you have a copyright, but the problem is if you upload them to a site like Shutterfly, the property you own is now stuck behind a licence” – that is what Nathan Dosch, a Wisconsin attorney specialising in estate planning says. I suppose this is going to be a lucrative market for the legal department, and it pays to always make sure you are ready to have your loose ends tied up when you are still alive, so that post-death discussions among your family members won’t be a mess. After all, you certainly can’t verify that you’re dead to an online service, can you?

Edwin Kee
Categories: Computers
Tags: cloud computing