More broadly, America’s Uniform Law Commission, a non-partisan group that creates model legislation that is then adopted unchanged by many American states, has a “Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets” committee working on amendments to existing ULC laws that would give executors many of the same powers over digital assets that they have over financial and physical ones, while absolving service providers of any liability. These adjustments could be incorporated into some states’ laws as soon as 2015, though some federal fiddles may be required as well. In her paper, Ms Perrone notes that such uniformity would mean that “people would no longer have to rely on companies’ varying terms of use to determine how to manage digital assets.” When dealing with death, a little certainty can be a great comfort.

 

– The Economist reports on “Who owns your data when you’re dead.” Good summary of a recent paper and legal progress on how to distribute data post-mortem in a world with a couple thousand years of familiarity with the concept of physical asset inheritance.

• Emerging law for data inheritance •

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