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Soldier’s Kin to Get Access to His E-Mails
In Memorium, Iraq, Law Comments (0)
Last December there was a big brouhaha over Yahoo’s refusal to hand over the contents of a dead Marine’s Yahoo Mail account to his parents.
Now Findlaw is reporting that Lance Corporal Ellsworth’s kin will get that access:
An Oakland County probate judge signed an order Wednesday directing Yahoo! Inc. to provide the contents of the e-mail account used by Lance Cpl. Justin M. Ellsworth, 20, who was killed Nov. 13 while inspecting a bomb in Al Anbar province.
Yahoo!, which originally refused the family’s request to hand over the account, did not fight the order and gave the family a CD containing more than 10,000 pages of material.
This case has opened up a new discussion on estate rights to possessions of the deceased. Did Cpl. Ellsworth actually “own” the emails he sent and received? If he owned them, does his estate have the right to possession when he dies? Does his death actually terminate all rights to information or other intellectual property stored on the servers of others?
These are vital questions that deserve an answer. Sometimes the answer to those questions are found in contract law. In this instance, Yahoo’s terms of service provide:
No Right of Survivorship and Non-Transferability. You agree that your Yahoo! account is non-transferable and any rights to your Yahoo! I.D. or contents within your account terminate upon your death. Upon receipt of a copy of a death certificate, your account may be terminated and all contents therein permanently deleted.
But, does, or should, that preclude your estate from access to the information? Yahoo claimed that it does and forced Cpl. Ellsworth’s parents into court to force the release of the information. The Ellsworths did not want to transfer the account to themselves in order to use it for themselves. They merely wanted to retrieve the information within it.
The language here seems vague enough to me to say that the answer just isn’t clear.
MickC @ April 21, 2005