Make provision to take care of your digital assets

An associate of mine in the UK recently gave a presentation which had me think to propagate the thought here for some of you to take note of.

The majority of us are at the stage in life where we have or should have created a will.

Until hearing about the content of this presentation i had never thought of the issue of digital assets, never mind making provision for them in your will.

Some of you have either writings or websites or web based businesses that are deemed digital assets. Unless they are listed in your will with details and passwords these assets essentially get lost in event of your death.

Whats more in certain countries the law requires that the access information be placed in writing in the wil. In countries like the UK a will is open public document upon death exposing such information.

The suggestion is to have such information written down on paper and placed in an envelope and such envelope described in the will in reference to the said digital assets. This avoids potential theft or any other malpractice.

I thought it worth letting you all know of this matter we often tend to overlook the obvious as we all take this medium somewhat for granted.

While on this thought i would suggest that the current mods give consideration to this topic in respect of dealing with the event of passing of any of the signatories to ownership of our forum something of this nature has impact on the longevity of our family.

Digital assets is a broad term and you may think it does not apply to you however i would argue that most of us have some sort of digital assets even if they limited to our own computer.

Just something further to be concerned about and deal with as we move more and more into a trully digital age.

Sorry i know its not woodworking but my thoughts of you all dont stop at woodworking.

That is a good point Rob. I recently brought up fact it could happen a while back in the mod forum. At another site that I frequented (mouseguns.com) the owner was diagnosed with cancer this past summer, he's since passed. He did pass the ownership of the site to another gun related site owner, but made me think of the same issue and how it would affect our site. I hadn't looked at it from the point of domain ownership or site account ownership. We'll re-visit that discussion just to make sure we're covered. From the administrative and moderator stand point, in our case more is better, I think were good there.

As for my own sites, not much worth saving, my clients have ownership of their domain(s) and FTP access to collect/backup their content in the event I was unable to provide services anymore.

Darren and others dont think only in terms of sites.

Todays family photos are possibly on a gallery of some sort and access to it is covered by a username and password.

That info needs to be passed on for next in line to be able to get access to it.

The terms of service of much of these service orientated sites will restrict them from providing access to anyone unless suitably leagally accomodated and proven in a will document.

In the midst of the emotional upset caused by a death in the family its not something in a shoe box that will be come across when the persons effects are sorted out. This stuff is invisible unless some form of communication of its existence is passed on. Then there is the aspect of passing on the ownership as well.

Even a simple back up harddrive, who knows what you have on it???

Family might simply get to the point of clearing out stuff and saying heck "his/her" computer was so old just chuck it out without thinking of the content of the harddrive.

Try to think in terms of 10 or more years hence.

Very good point Rob......and timely as well. With the emergence of this digital age, we all have some exposure out there that should be taken care of so that our loved ones do not have too.

When you think about it, this would be a great idea for a start up company, someone that should do all of this legwork for you. I am surprised our lawyer community has not picked up on it yet

That is true Rob, I wasn't looking at it from that perspective...another point is that it's something else to add to my current business plans too.

There used to be scripts and plugins for various forum and site software that would automatically send an email on your behalf if you hadn't signed in for X amount of time. In that email you could provide the information to someone of how to login and do as requested with the site/software.

I wouldn't doubt there isn't a site out there like that, but that would be kind of scary to give someplace that kind of info. Probably better off putting it in a will/safety deposit box with a designated beneficiary.