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Dispute Continues Over Posthumous Yahoo! Mail
XPisthenewNT points out BBC coverage of the earlier-mentioned dispute between Yahoo! and the family of Justin Ellsworth. An excerpt: "Police sergeant John Ellsworth has sparked a privacy debate in the U.S. that has prompted many to reconsider who can access their e-mail. Mr. Ellsworth is locked in a legal fight with Yahoo! after his son, L/Cpl Justin Ellsworth, a U.S. marine serving in Falluja, was killed by a roadside bomb."
That would be Bill Hicks. It's a great bit, and it's available on a CD called Relentless.
The plural of 'anecdote' is not 'data'. --Dan Kaminsky
While in college I worked for three different banks - and each were under the same federal regulations (duh). A person brings a short notice (a brief one page showing that the person died - gotten at the county office) and the person proves they are responsible for the estate then they get access to the account. No court order needed. The only time this becomes an issue is when next of kin start fighting over the property - otherwise, it goes to next of kin. IF next of kin are fighting then the court provides an order to the bank to not allow anyone to access the box until further notice.
I mod down so you can mod up. Your welcome.
If this was about regular old pen and paper snail mail letters, there would be no doubt that the letters would belong to the estate. However, due to the clause in the T&C of Yahoo!, they are saying that either they own them or no one owns them. I guess what the father is trying to do is get the emails set on the same level as snail mail. Also if they were a confided in letter, why not just delete them after you are done with them? Or save them someplace and delete them off the yahoo server?
On the other basis for this, is that the son was keeping a journal/log using the email that he (the son) was saving. He wanted them to stay around and told his father about this. That is why he is trying to get access to the emails.
Fly me to the moon Let me sing among those stars Let me see what spring is like On jupiter and mars
The Yahoo account is an agreement between Yahoo and a person for limited access to Yahoo's storage system.
The copyright in the emails authored by the deceased is owned by the deceased's estate. Yahoo happens to own media on which a copy of the emails is stored.
The deceased has no right to access the copy of the material on Yahoo's media without Yahoo's permission. Yahoo gave the deceased permission to access the material on their media for a limited term, which ended with the deceased's death.
Owning the copyright in a particular material does not give someone the right to look at copies of that material on other people's media. If it did, the RIAA could force you to let them listen to your CD's. If the record company has a huge fire and all their copies of their copywritten material burns to a crisp, they can't compel someone else with a copy of that material to give them access to it.
In this case, the only thing the copyright ownership gives the estate the right to do is demand that Yahoo delete the copies of the email from their servers. And it CERTAINLY doesn't give them the right to look at emails in the account authored by other people which the estate does not have copyright ownership of.
If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because they own the copyrights in the email, than any publisher would be able to look at any copy of anything they publish, which is obviously not the case. If the deceased's estate has the right to access the deceased's account because of the agreement between the deceased and Yahoo, then clauses which terminate a contract at one of the party's deaths would have to be invalid, which is also not the case.
No one has the right to access anyone else's property. It doesn't matter if the agreement between Yahoo and the deceased eliminated the "right" of the deceased's estate to access Yahoo's media - that right never existed in the first place. The estate has to prove that Yahoo agreed to give them that right, which they can not.
paintball