A recent article from Law Vibe provided some advice regarding the legal considerations for digital estate planning. The article recognized the law’s lack of precedence for digital assets and provided some insight about different types of online content like email, blogs and social networking profiles.

As we’ve discussed before, there are two issues at play: content and access. 

Content is simple. Anything that you’ve created is your intellectual property and that is governed by traditional property laws. Many sites require that you accept a terms of service document that essentially grants them ownership of your content. That’s right, you don’t legally own the contents of your Facebook profile. Most of these services allow you to cancel your account and remove the content from their servers. In February Facebook took some heat for changing their TOS document to grant them complete ownership of your content.  This was to clarify that Facebook should continue to display messages you’ve sent to other people even after you cancel your profile. Their intention was not to deny you control of your own content, despite the legal terms. As long as Facebook values their users there’s a large social control that will prevent them from doing anything nefarious with your content.  You should check the terms of service for your accounts and be certain of content ownership.

Access is a bit more complicated. Policies often prevent your survivors  from accessing your content and this was the source of several lawsuits like the one mentioned by Law Vibe.  This is where your digital executor and digital will come into play. The digital executor can help you carry out your wishes according to a document giving them passwords and instructions. It’s simple and more direct, but lacks legal standing. Law Vibe provides a good set of instructions for how to do this, but you should also check out our Digital Death Survival Guide. My only caution is that you do not list user names or passwords in your legal will. Law Vibe doesn’t mention this, but it’s important to remember that a legal will becomes a public document upon your death.

I’m pleased to see that Law Vibe is thinking about this issue. This is certainly coming to the forefront of modern law practice.

According to CNET, Symantec is launching its Norton Online Living Calculator today, designed to determine the black market value of your online assets. The calculator asks questions about online finance, social networking and email accounts. The output is an estimated value of your personal information, which is substantially less than I imagined.  Mine was $10.59 a far cry from the $100.00 I estimated.

While The Digital Beyond isn’t particularly interested in selling you security software, the concept of assigning monetary value to online assets is of particular interest to us. If my information is only worth ten dollars on the black market, how valuable is it to my family after my death? Just consider your hourly wage and how many hours it might take to gather up your online assets. Even after weeks of effort they might not know about or gain access to everything.  I’d suspect that its worth more than ten dollars, and maybe more than the subscription fees for the growing list of digital estate services.

Norton Online Living Calculator

Seen today on CrunchGear and Gizmodo, this Japanese-developed device sends Tweets about your heartbeat. Despite scaring your relatives when Twitter is down, this device could lead the way for a “is ___ dead” service with a yes/no/unsure API. While this adds some biological fact to confirming one’s death, there’s several kinks like hospitalization or disconnected monitors that would introduce unreliability.

From the translated promotional video:

“Now I can die and post this info to Twitter. That’s what I call a revolution!”

Twitter Heartbeat Device