Book review: Digital Death, Digital Assets and Post-Mortem Privacy

Edited by: Edina Harbinja

Reviewed by: Niklas Schmidt

Digital assets are increasingly showing up in deceased persons’ estates. This, of course, concerns digital natives, being individuals who have grown up with the internet, computers, smartphones and other digital devices. Such people are native to social media, cloud storage services, blogging, running YouTube channels and holding crypto.

However, it also concerns digital immigrants, being older adults who may find it more challenging to adapt to new digital platforms or technologies and who may prefer more traditional methods of communication but will nevertheless have email accounts and digital photo collections.

Private client advisors need to be able to deal with digital assets in the context of death. This book, Digital Death, Digital Assets and Post-Mortem Privacy, might well be a good place to start for those unfamiliar with the terrain.

The book starts by noting that the issue of digital assets and death was first discussed in the media about 20 years ago. Nevertheless, although a lot of time has passed, there is still little clarity in the law in most jurisdictions. The court decisions handed down in this area during the past two decades show the manifold social and ethical issues involved with digital assets and certain legal dilemmas stemming from concepts of property, privacy, succession, copyright and contract law.

The studiously researched cases described in this book illustrate several points. First, how transitory and ethereal many digital assets are in reality. Although a layperson will see no big difference between a physical book and an e-book or between a letter and an email, from a legal perspective they are very different.

Second, how strong the position is of big tech companies on whose servers many of these digital assets are hosted and whose terms and conditions govern their usage. These companies have slowly understood the role they play and are increasingly offering software solutions for the event of a user’s death.

Although this book will not give the practitioner who is in a hurry definitive answers to a case they have to solve, it does give interesting food for thought, as well as helpful arguments.

Price: GBP85

Publisher: Edinburgh University Press

ISBN: 978-1474485364