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Dispute Continues Over Posthumous Yahoo! Mail

Posted by timothy on from the tough-nut-to-crack dept.

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."

9 of 390 comments (clear)

  1. Value by Robert+Hayden · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Since the messages may be valuable (although probably are not), shouldn't it be a simple matter to claim they are part of the estate and get a TRO and be done with it?

    After all, the copyright is held by the decedant, so wouldn't that material value pass to his heirs?

    1. Re:Value by geoffspear · · Score: 2, Interesting
      No, it wouldn't.

      That's like claiming a publisher needs to provide an author with copies of his book because he owns the copyright.

      They would be able to sue Yahoo! if they tried to publish or otherwise distribute the messages, but copyright law doesn't require them to provide copies of them. Their contract with their users might, but I doubt it, unless it was written by a really bad lawyer. Having clause like that would open them up to massive lawsuits if they had a catastrophic failure of their servers and lost people's messages.

      --
      Don't blame me; I'm never given mod points.
    2. Re:Value by javatips · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The thing is, AFAIK, that your cannot terminate ones copyright by contract. One can transfer his copyright to some other entity, but copyright cannot be terminated.

      So this clause of the contract would be invalid. I'm pretty sure that the father will win in court if it ever goes there.

      The only problem that he may have is probably within Yahoo right to not let anyone else access the account. But should not prevent Yahoo to provide the content of the account.

      It is also possible that Yahoo will only be forced to provide the e-mails the deceased wrote and not the ones he received.

  2. In the real world... by AtariAmarok · · Score: 2, Interesting

    In the real world, what is done with your safe deposit box, or your post office box if you die and no-one can find the key? I really don't know the answer to this, but am wondering if the precedence/situation might apply here at all.

    --
    Don't blame Durga. I voted for Centauri.
    1. Re:In the real world... by YrWrstNtmr · · Score: 2, Interesting
      no-one can find the key

      They drill the lock out. A safe deposit box and its contents are 'property', unlike an email account, which is a service.

  3. I want to take it with me by drteknikal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If you want people to have access to your accounts, you had better document the accounts, the passwords, and the access methods for them before you die.

    Why should my survivors get access to stuff in my virtual world after I die if I never gave them any rights to it while I was alive?

    I understand, or at least I think I understand rights of survivorship. I have sympathy for those who have lost a loved one, but I don't see how that makes any legal difference.

    So let's say that I'm involved in a bunch of stuff that I don't want my survivors to know about, and we automatically give them rights to my virtual stuff when I die. They find out what a bastard I am, and their memories of me are forever saddened.

    Here's the opposing question: If we start handing out access to online resources when the account holder dies, don't we also have to make everything include an option to delete upon the death of the account holder?

    --
    http://drteknikal.blogspot.com/
  4. Doesn't this fall under Power of attorney by Quimo · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Having had to deal with dispersing the estate of family members I would have to think that this was a service that the deceased has subscribed to and it is the duty of the person with POE to properly close it up and deal with it. I don't see how Yahoo would be able to legally refuse in this case. As for the privacy aspect I don't see this really being an issue. You have died. You have selected (or had someone selected for you) to act on your behafe to take care of your afairs. Now I know that all my experiences deal with Canadian law but I can't see it being much different in the states.

  5. I've dealt with something similar by climb_no_fear · · Score: 5, Interesting

    An old girlfriend of mine died in a motorcycle crash. While she was still alive, she told me her password for her e-mail account (my name - easy to remember). I only logged into her account once while she was alive (she was standing next to me and asked me to do so), so I know the password was correct. Hours before she set out on her fateful trip, she sent me an email which I only received after getting the phone call. At this point, I tried to log in to her email account to see if she had left behind anything else there but access was already blocked. After the funeral, we cleaned out her apartment. We found her diary (I knew she had one). However, she never explicitly said anything to me about whether I should read it. Diaries are a private matter, so when her stepfather gave it to me (her mother had passed away already and her half-brother was just too young), I went over to her best friend's house, we talked about it and decided that we would burn it in the fireplace together. My point is, common sense should have some say. In spite of any agreements with Yahoo!, etc., if my name is the password and I know it, wasn't this proof enough that she had agreed that I should be allowed to access her email? On the other hand, without explicit permission, I'd never read someone's diary, it's too private. Perhaps his Yahoo! account was Justin Ellworth's diary of sorts ....

  6. Re:Sparked a privacy debate in the US? by tomhudson · · Score: 2, Interesting
    FTA (emphasis added):
    But Mr Ellsworth is not about to give up. Having spent weeks trying, unsuccessfully, to crack the password to his son's account, ...
    It was password-protected with a password that hs father can't guess, so he (the father) tries to crack it ...

    This means 2 things

    1. Since it wasn't a password that was easy to guess, it should be assumed that the son wanted it private ...
    2. The father is engaged in illegal activity (trying to hack another person's account) ...
    Now for what's in the back of a LOT of people's minds - what if the father gets access to all the email and finds out something his son didn't want him to know - for example, that his son had a boyfriend? Do we really want to see this on Springer?

    Releasing the emails would be a violation of the contract, as well as of the rights of other people whose emails are there. There is NO upside to this.