Delaware Enacts Law Allowing Heirs To Access Digital Assets of Deceased 82
An anonymous reader writes Ars reports: "Delaware has become the first state in the U.S .to enact a law that ensures families' rights to access the digital assets of loved ones during incapacitation or after death." In other states, the social media accounts and email of people who die also die with them since the companies hosting those accounts are not obligated to transfer access even to the heirs of the deceased. In Delaware, however, this is no longer the case. The article notes that even if the deceased was a resident of another state, if his/her will is governed by Delaware law, his/her heirs will be allowed to avail of the new law and gain access to all digital assets of the deceased.
The horse has bolted and been beaten to death. (Score:1)
While this well illustrates another evil of the cloud - the data was never really the living person's, so why would it follow normal law of being passed onto the deceased's estate? - it's nice to see that a responsible government is stepping in to regulate antisocial corporate behaviour.
Unfortunately, in a world so stupid that it accepts a return to the dumb terminals and the mainframes of 40+ years ago, a little bit of foresight is a desalination plant in an ocean of piss.
Or (Score:3)
You could just give them your password.
Re:Or (Score:5, Insightful)
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industry can go suck a big fat dick. I paid for access to some files, what I do with sais access is nobodys business. If I give it as a gift to someone else it should be ok. If I die and that access goes to someone else it should be ok. Or did I actually just pay for some kind of personal use license? If I did so, please resend me the files I accidently deleted. I still have the license I paid for, right? Can I d/l the media from somewhere, or make back up copies of it?
Pick a goddamn business model, tell us
Re: Or (Score:1, Interesting)
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How about we put Terms and Conditions in human parseable language first before we start blaming everyone for not reading?
Maybe if we tried to read the agreements that we signed, and we bitched and pestered companies, those Terms and Conditions would shrink.
But really, the real reason they're so long is that it's a legal agreement, and legal agreements cannot contain ambiguity. Every edge condition has to be thought of, parsed, and explained.
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How about you go learn about the First Sale doctrine and fuck off? There are a lot of products (not services) that shouldn't "magically" stop being products just because they're "on a computer!"
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If I rent a disc from Blockbuster, ermm.... Redbox or whatever, I don't get to keep it and shout "First Sale" if they ask for it back. If you're SOLD something, you can keep it. If you're rented access, you don't get to keep it.
Content industries have been trying to move from a sale model to a pay-per-view model for a number of years, and the "let's stream everything, why would I want a physical disc anymore??" crowd have been helping them along.
Re:Or (Score:4, Insightful)
... and the keys to your house, car, number of your credit cards and access to the storage-box at your bank.
Its not like you have anything to hide or that some heirs simply can't be trusted ...
Re:Or (Score:5, Interesting)
Some people have already replied that you might not be able to trust everyone with your password, but that's only one of the problems. The other problem is that although your heirs may be able to physically read the password from your sealed envelope and type it in, just typing in the password won't make your access authorized. Trying to download the deceased's ebooks, music, or apps would be piracy, and even just revealing that you accessed the account (by trying to use the information in it in a billing dispute, or to take it to the press if it is whistleblowing in nature, for instance) could subject you to a selectively prosecuted hacking charge in court to get you to shut up.
And even if you don't actually get in legal trouble for accessing the account, companies could use the illegal nature of the access to refuse to do things that they would do upon request of the account owner, such as closing the account (if you want it closed), leaving the account open (if you want to keep paying for it), or restoring or sending you a backup.
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Having the password does not make you authorized. But being a dead persons heir, authorize you to take control of their posessions. Downloading the deceased's music is not piracy. similiar to how using the door key to enter the deceaseds home and grab the furniture is not burglary. It is all yours now - assuming the testament was not contested and all the heirs agreed on who gets what. Your brother got the sofa, you got the ebook collection, ...
The deceased, unless they created the music, does not own the music. The purchased a license for them to listen to the music. Same with ebooks. You aren't buying anything, you are licensing the content. Most of these things are licensed to specific users (the one paying the fee) and are not licensed where anyone can use it as long as it is only one person at a time (although some are). However, the deceased party created the music, or photos or whatever, then they, as copyright owner, do own it. That is of
Sale by another name (Score:2)
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Chances are it was sold to them with a buy button and the description of the product was the product not the licence to the product. Chances are the payment was one time payment for permanent access to the copy. This is the definition of a sale. Calling a sale by another name does not change it from being a sale.
Unfortunately, it does. You also don't usually buy software. It may look like a sale and even be called a sale, but you are accepting a license to use the product in a manner that the owner of the product deems appropriate. If it were a true sale, you would be the owner and thus could do with it whatever you want. Also, for a sale to take place, there has to be an exchange money for tangible property. Electronic distribution has already been determined by the courts not to be tangible personal property,
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European Court of Justice ruled on July 3, 2012, that it is indeed permissible to resell software licenses even if the digital good has been downloaded directly from the Internet, and that the first-sale doctrine applied whenever software was originally sold to a customer for an unlimited amount of time, as such sale involves a transfer of ownership, thus prohibiting any software maker from preventing the resale of their software by any of their legitimate owners
In the United States the issue is working its way through the courts. Basically some courts are willing to call a spade a spade. And know a sale when they see one.
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Bullshit. They most certainly do own that copy of the music, and none of your ridiculous FUD and RIAA shilling will change that.
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Bullshit. They most certainly do own that copy of the music, and none of your ridiculous FUD and RIAA shilling will change that.
It has nothing to do with the RIAA. An mp3 file is not considered tangible personal property, the media it is on is, however. It is also not considered real property (ie land and buildings). As such, there is nothing to transfer or inherit. Now, if the files are stored on a local computer, that is personal property and you can inherit that. However, your remote hosted drive is not owned by you and cannot be inherited.
I can buy a book and somebody can inherit it. I cannot buy a pattern of electrons called a
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Nobody except the RIAA, MPAA, et. al. has ever made a legal argument that such a distinction exists. I do not believe it exists. I do not believe that any court has ruled that such a distinction exists or that any law has been enacted that creates such a distinction. I think you are an RIAA (et al) shill, spreading FUD.
Now put
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Nobody except the RIAA, MPAA, et. al. has ever made a legal argument that such a distinction exists. I do not believe it exists. I do not believe that any court has ruled that such a distinction exists or that any law has been enacted that creates such a distinction. I think you are an RIAA (et al) shill, spreading FUD.
Now put up or shut up.
It doesn't matter what you believe, only what the law/courts say. There are ample court cases, most of it under state sales and use tax laws to show that electronic content is not a sale but a contract agreement to use it. That's one of the reasons there are federal proposals to tax edelivery of content -- because current tangible property laws don't apply. It has nothing to do with the RIAA or MPAA. It has to do with 200 years of property law. Like all laws, if you don't like it, work to change it.
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O really? Then cite one or fuck off!
Good for music, movies and ebooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for music, movies and ebooks (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Good for music, movies and ebooks (Score:5, Informative)
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Unfortunately, that's not the case. Bruce Willis raised a fuss a while ago about not being able to leave his iTunes music collection to his children. The Ts and Cs state that the license to listen to the music is strictly non-transferrable. (He should have just "pirated" it instead).
This is basically the reason I don't use ebooks - with a paper book, I can buy it and read it, then my wife can read it, I can lend it to friends/family, it can sit on book shelves for years and then my kids can read it, their kids can read it decades later, or I can sell it, etc. All this stuff is considered the "normal" way to use a book. Compare to an ebook: I buy it. Then my wife has to buy it(*). Them my friends/family have to buy it. Then my kids have to buy it. Their kids have to buy it. See t
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I like the convenience of ebooks as I don't have to worry about carrying around a dead-tree book and can instead just use my phone (or kindle etc) which is generally lighter. I recommend using Calibre [calibre-ebook.com] to transfer e-books around if you don't mind breaking the Ts&Cs.
I'm aware that the DRM can be trivially removed, but if I'm going to have to break copyright law in order to actually use what I've purchased, I'm left wondering why I wouldn't just break copyright law *instead* of purchasing it in the first place?
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Compare to an ebook: I buy it. Then my wife has to buy it(*). Them my friends/family have to buy it. Then my kids have to buy it. Their kids have to buy it. See the problem?
I might be ok with this for certain books if ebooks were substantially cheaper. Currently even for books I don't want to keep
it's cheaper to buy the book, read it, and resell it on amazon. If a $20 paper book gives the author $7 of royalties then at
a maximum an ebook should be priced at about $7.50 but because you can't turn around and resell that ebook it should
probably be priced closer to $3 or less. If ebooks actually started being priced at a rental price then it would make alot more
sense to buy eboo
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In fact, the editing process is such that the cost of printing, shipping, warehousing, distribution is really only around 10% of the retail cost.
If the printing and shipping (including the cost of amazon to ship it to me) is really only 10% then I will never be buying an ebook unless forced to
because it's worth alot more than 10% to me to have the physical book plus the resale value of the book is almost always worth more than 10%.
So what you're basically saying is that ebooks can't afford to compete with paper books on price which I find utter nonsense.
Amazon might have to reduce their commission or they might have to rethink how they do it but it
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This is basically the reason I don't use ebooks - with a paper book, I can buy it and read it, then my wife can read it, I can lend it to friends/family, it can sit on book shelves for years and then my kids can read it, their kids can read it decades later, or I can sell it, etc. All this stuff is considered the "normal" way to use a book. Compare to an ebook: I buy it. Then my wife has to buy it(*). Them my friends/family have to buy it. Then my kids have to buy it. Their kids have to buy it. See the problem?
Oh, and people used to make fun of Stallman's The Right to Read [gnu.org] for being so far-fetched. Almost everything in there has already happened, and it only took 20 years, not 100.
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so if it becomes law that your heirs get your digital property
They do, now, in Delaware. But music that you've licensed doesn't belong to you. It was licensed. It will take a separate law to make music license purchases online into music purchases online.
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I don't care much for the social media accounts, but it is good that bought ebooks, music and movies should be accessible to next of kin, just like their physical counterparts are.
Ebboks, movies, etc. are not personal property. They are simply licenses to view the copyrighted content. Physical books, on the other hand are tangible property and can be given, willed, etc. Until the license agreements change, it won't matter what Delaware's law says. You cannot inherit from the deceased what is not theirs in the first place.
My porn collection (Score:5, Funny)
Why would I want my porn collection going to my wife? I'd much rather give it to my girlfriend. After all, we bought most of it together.
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Why would I want my porn collection going to my wife? I'd much rather give it to my girlfriend. After all, we bought most of it together.
Starred in it too I hear.
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several lies here.
1) you have a wife. c'mon, this is slashdot.
2) you have a girlfriend. see above.
3) you bought porn. really?
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Why death? (Score:5, Interesting)
So transferring digital goods on death is now allowed.
How about when I'm still alive?
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Sorry, no, we'll have to kill you first.
Okay so what happens if... (Score:2)
Let's assume for a second that a US citizen who ia a Delaware resident and has a will governed by Delaware law has died. How does this provide his/her heirs the ability to:
for example, a) access an account on a database/web forum located solely on a computer in California;
or b) access an account for an online store residing in let's say, Japan or Australia or Argentina?
in example a, the account is located
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They will do it the same way they always do. If the company is "out of state" but does business in Deleware, they can be sued in Deleware. Same if they are out of Country.
Now, how effectively can Deleware (or the US if it is out of country) claim the assets from the judgement, that is obviously case by case.
An example would be someone sueing Google. Google doesn't recognize Deleware's authority, doesn't show up for trial. Summary judgement for claimant in $XXX. Claimant then sees a Google StreetView car pa
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Did you try doing a password reset on your parent's webmail account? I was able to do that to my mother's Yahoo account after she died (since she had set up her security questions with truthful answers), and I was then able to do the same for her Facebook account, which was tied to that email.
Granted, I had to actually ask one of my aunts for the answer to one of the questions, since it was about something we had never discussed, but overall it wasn't too difficult.
It was actually kind of humorous, since my
Old Virtual Money (Score:1)
"Did you earn that gold, or did your dad give it to you?" "Death to bourgeoisie Pandaren!"
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The actual law specifies not just digital assets, but also digital accounts. Your Battle.Net account is absolutely an account.
(Do people *really* want to take over Battle.Net accounts when their spouses die?)
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(Do people *really* want to take over Battle.Net accounts when their spouses die?)
If I die tomorrow, my family should absolutely inherit access to my steam and gog and other accounts. My kids play those games daily right now.
Why should they have to re-buy everything just because I got hit by a bus?
My will reads (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting... (Score:3)
This has interesting implications for the entire industry. Mainly because they'll now need to restructure their systems to deal with moving an asset from one account to another as well as deal with when one user ends up with 2 of the same media. It may seem simple from the outside but if they've never prepared for these problems it could be a major headache for them now.
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Not that hard. So lets say my brother has an accident, and leave me his Pink Floyd albums on iTunes.
If I don't have an account already, I simply start using the inherited account. Easy for them. Maybe I want the name changed.
If I already have an account, they can simply give me the albums he had. It is digital stuff, so there is no difference between a "new" instance of an album and and "old". So they won't need a special transfer mechanism - just give me a new copy of whatever is in the old account before deleting it. No new procedure, merely a "sale without the money". If I already had those albums in my own account it is even easier - no change! There is no such thing as "two instances" of the same album on iTunes.
You clearly don't work in IT. Software doesn't work that way. If the datatable is shaped like this:
Customers
--------------------
name, cust_id, credits
Items
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Cust_id, song
Then your system would work. But it probably is not organized like that. That's very inefficient. What if the items table is like this:
Items
--------------------
Pinfloyd - the wall Y/N?
Pinfloyd - the Division bell Y/N?
Pinfloyd - Live Y/N?
Each of those Yes/No's only takes up 1 bit of space. It's either 1 or 0 on the datatabl
Well I Think That's Swell! (Score:2)
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If the deceased had things on paper, or on their computer at home, they would certainly be able to learn things about the deceased. How is this different?
Do you want to prevent people from inheriting paper documents from the deceased so relatives can't find out about their gay love letters or whatever?
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They won't be. It would be ridiculously easy to make it economically unattractive for someone to take over an account, for example, by including a discretionary discount in the account that is removed upon death.
Alternatively, they could just get their customers to agree to new T&Cs specifically stating that the contract ends on their death.
Google already has a feature where they ask people to specify what happens to their accounts on their death. I can't see law trumping the express wish of the decease
So if corporations are people now...? (Score:2)
So if corporations are people, does this give creditors a legal right to digital assets of companies incorporated in Delaware after bankruptcy?
No exemptions for zero-knowledge services? (Score:1)
A "zero-knowledge" service provider (allegedly) has no access to most of the digital assets stored by their service (e.g. LastPass, SpiderOak, etc.). They store encrypted blobs of data on your behalf, and send you these encrypted blobs at your request. Your PC (and not their servers) then decrypts this data using your password (of which the service provider has no knowledge).
I scanned through the bill, and it doesn't seem to acknowledge that such services exist. It doesn't even acknowledge that passwords th
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It says that the heir has the same rights as an authorized user. An authorized user who lost the password in this situation would not be able to get it by asking the company, so the heirs would not be able to ask the company either. On the other hand, if the heirs do get the password (maybe the deceased left it in a safety deposit box), it would stop the company terminating the account for TOS violation.
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Unless you take strong measures on your own, there's zero chance that any of your "digital stuff" will be destroyed when you die.
Your choices, if any really exist, are having your family comb through it, setting up a dead-man switch, or having a corporation use it for their own profit. Because once they're sure you're dead, the zaibatsus would sell your toes to foot fe
The Four Final Things (Score:1)
This would be the last thing on my mind.