Someone who owned 10,000 hardcover books and the same number of vinyl records could bequeath them to descendants, but legal experts say passing on iTunes and Kindle libraries would be much more complicated.<\/p>\n
And one\u2019s heirs stand to lose huge sums of money. \u201cI find it hard to imagine a situation where a family would be OK with losing a collection of 10,000 books and songs,\u201d says Evan Carroll, co-author of \u201cYour Digital Afterlife.\u201d \u201cLegally dividing one account among several heirs would also be extremely difficult.\u201d<\/p>\n
Part of the problem is that with digital content, one doesn\u2019t have the same rights as with print books and CDs. Customers own a license to use the digital files \u2014 but they don\u2019t actually own them.<\/p>\n
[. . .]<\/p>\n
Most digital content exists in a legal black hole. \u201cThe law is light years away from catching up with the types of assets we have in the 21st Century,\u201d says Wheatley-Liss. In recent years, Connecticut, Rhode Island, Indiana, Oklahoma and Idaho passed laws to allow executors and relatives access to email and social networking accounts of those who\u2019ve died, but the regulations don\u2019t cover digital files purchased.<\/p>\n
Apple and Amazon did not respond to requests for comment.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Unless medical science has a solution up their collective sleeves, we’re all going to die (eventually). It may be an individual shock, but humans have been dying forever — it’s the unwelcome end of the trip. As a result, we’ve evolved ways to redistribute the property of deceased members of our families and communities. When […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,9,28,15],"tags":[833,160,122,200,593],"class_list":["post-16693","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-law","category-media","category-technology","tag-amazon","tag-apple","tag-movies","tag-music","tag-socialmedia"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-4lf","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16693"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":16694,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16693\/revisions\/16694"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16693"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16693"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16693"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}