Digital inheritance

Abstract: The creation of a personal legacy is a process through which information, values, and memories are passed down to future generations. This process is inherently subjective, both as a curated collection of the elements of one's life, and as an evolving form of remembrance that is subject to the interpretations of those to whom it is left. Based on directed storytelling sessions with 14 adults from a large Midwestern city in the USA, we explore users' perceptions of how their use of digital systems and information will impact how their lives are interpreted and reflected upon by their families and by future generations. Our findings describe nuances regarding how shifting notions about technological systems and the long-term accessibility of digital information impact the ways in which we share, and subsequently manage, information online. This work, explored here in the context of legacy, exposes opportunities to help users engage with their digital information through the curation of meaningful records, the dispossession of digital debris, and a reexamination of how digital systems and services influence the accessibility and lifespan of digital information.

Abstract: What is the prospect of disconnection – of a media end – in a digital memory culture that one-sidedly celebrates the virtues of non-stop connectivity, limitless perpetuation and endless recording? Is any form of closure whatsoever conceivable when technologies afford practices that allow for unprecedented continuing bonds with the dead online? Meditating existentially on the human givens of endings and closure – and their place or displacement in media theory and culture – poised against the horizons of ‘forever’ as these manifest themselves within our contemporary digital ecology, this chapter attends to the digital inheritance area, and to forms of digital eternity currently in circulation, as well as a few services for ending media life. With a particular focus on agency, as a troubled yet imperative piece of the contemporary digital and existential puzzle, it argues that techno-existential closure seems both repressed and incited somehow by the emergence of the digital afterlife.

Abstract: The challenges for the existing legal framework, entailed by the Internet revolution, to a growing extent tackle also on the problems of inheritance law. The Bundesgerichtshof’s decision of 12 July 2018 (III ZR 183/17) serves as a clear epitome of the complexity of questions triggered by the increasing transfer of private and market activity into the digital realm. The problem of inheritability of digital assets consists of at least three more particular dimensions. (a) Above all, it is the issue of getting access to the deceased’s account – especially, to its publicly unavailable content. By answering this question, BGH tackled also on two other dimensions of the problem. (b) As has been implicitly claimed in the judgment, the question of inheritance of an account is also interconnected with succession over particular assets stored on this account. In particular, access to an account may be a necessary prerequisite for exercising entitlements over particular assets, e.g. to download an item subjected to one’s intellectual property right, such as a photograph or a video recording. (c) The problem of digital inheritance exceeds also beyond the traditional domain of private law succession rules and constitutes a compound nexus, which combines elements of inheritance, contract, and public law (in the latter regard e.g. privacy and data protection). Observed from the Polish perspective, the judgment opens a new interesting chapter in the discussion over the concept and legal framework of ‘digital inheritance’, initiated a few years ago and encompassing so far several contributions that attempt to incorporate this notion into the existing schemes of private law. The BGH judgment brought the issue into wider public attention and triggered media coverage. The matter still lacks, however, a direct voice of Polish courts. From this perspective, the decision of BGH, along with previous US case-law, may provide a clear point of reference for the Polish legal system. To discuss its relevance, the following observations will focus on the issues related to a particular fraction of digital assets – i.e. the accounts on online platforms and the items stored at them by them by users. In major part, these remarks may be referred also to post-mortem fate of other types of a digital assets.