Timeliness of posthumous digital personhood?

[deansaxe]

          To the point I made above about posthumous digital personhood, what does it mean for someone to manage your full digital legacy/personhood? What's the amount of time someone could/would do that? Does it matter if your intentions are forgotten in fifty years when no one you knew is around regardless?

Originally posted by @mdes206 in #30 (comment)

[gffletch]

Doesn't this happen to some extent today? The family estate of say C.S. Lewis manages who can have rights to produce derivative works of his writings. How true the family estate manages to the original wishes of the author is going to be mixed. For those not familiar with C.S. Lewis I'm not sure he would have loved the movie rendition of "The Voyage of the Dawn Treader" :) but maybe???

[xmlgrrl]

This is where I'd think other bodies of law, particularly IP law, will intersect with the rights of a person and which ones rights when they die. Things like this: https://actingmagazine.com/2025/01/when-an-actor-dies-who-gets-the-royalties/ Some people presciently make arrangements, but sometimes their estate is left with the big questions: https://www.forbes.com/sites/timlammers/2024/09/09/james-earl-jones-signed-over-rights-for-ai-to-recreate-darth-vaders-voice/

[mdes206]

@gffletch CS Lewis is such an apropos reference since he wrote one of the most compelling reflections on grief, but published under a pen name to avoid it being associated with him initially! Yes, it does happen with public figures, I believe Robin Williams had a provision that his content not be used for 50 years or something. The average person- probably not. Not that people will profit off us as individuals, but we still may want to retain privately.

[rkzack]

Related to this, my understanding is that the online privacy protections provided for in agreements like the GDPR and CCPA actually end when someone passes away. I think this actually means that providers have no further obligations of privacy with your data after that point. In which case, in the absence of a provider giving you an online tool (such as Facebook's Legacy Contact), the only remedy is for a fiduciary to close the accounts and/or delete your data.