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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."
of that comedian joking about not wanting to die because of the dread of his parents finding the "porn wing" of his apartment.
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?
as a non-lawyer and a non-law student:
the family will need to prove that the yahoo mail account is property, and as such becomes part of your estate when you die, so you can will it to someone. what happens to property that's not in your will when you die?
i think yahoo is just covering up that they already dleted the account, honestly.
-mkb
TFA doesn't mention anything about whether or not this young Marine had a will. I would imagine(please correct me if I am wrong) that the Armed Services would provide some type of legal services for will making for him. If he wanted people to read his mail, it should have been in a will......
Monstar L
IANAL.While I truly respect privacy rights, even after a person is dead, perhaps a little common sense (or adjustment to the appropriate laws) is in order. Why _not_ let the family of this person have access unless that person has a will or last testament that says otherwise? Why proceed from the other direction that assumes the deceased would not want his family to have access even though there is no documentation specifying that?
Trolls: The high-tech version of those morons that scrawl obscenities in public bathrooms.
Email is not the only thing that can have this happen - you can also have the same sort of problems with a bank safe deposit box.
If you have a safe deposit box in your name only, and you die, until the courts approve of your estate's executor, nobody will be able to get to the contents of that box - so think twice about putting anything in a safe deposit box that would be needed by your survivors within a month or less of your demise.
www.eFax.com are spammers
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.
It never ends, even after you're dead.
I tend to grant Yahoo! the benefit of the doubt on this one. If the man had wanted the contents of his email box to be disclosed to his family, he would (or should) have made arrangements to do so.
No mod points, no meta-moderating/Firehose/all the other free work Slashdot wants me to do.
Well, that's why they make keystroke loggers.
I mean why wait for "permission".
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/
Tough. Yahoo can't presume to think and speak for the dead guy. It's the terms of service which the millions of users have agreed to. If the family wants to put up a geocities web-shrine they could use their own email from the guy (assuming they were smart enough to save it) but not mail to others.
Trolling is a art,
Yahoo! will drag this one out till the account becomes inactive and...
I have no idea what it must be like to lose a son that way. ...but what if this guy finds out that his son, the soldier, had an insatiable for gay porn?
There are things we don't want to know about people - its probably best not to go digging through their most personal stuff even after they've died.
Know what I like about atheists? I've yet to meet one that believes God is on their side.
That kinda brings up a point. Other folks emailed this guy assuming that it was confidential.
I feel for his family, but the other folks involved have privacy rights as well. What if friends emailed him some very private, personal email asking for advice. Email provides more protection, than say snail mail which anyone can read (granted not ALOT more, but at least someone has to have the id and pw).
So Long and Thanks for all the Fish.
Bollocks, anyone who sends an e-mail to a yahoo, hotmail, etc account and thinks that it is "private" is off their rocker.
It take more faith to believe in evolution than it takes to believe in God
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.
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 ....
The article states "the young soldier had spent much of his spare time e-mailing his folks back home through Yahoo! webmail."
That in mind, why don't the "folks" have the e-mails that he sent to them? Wouldn't you keep (even treasure) the e-mails of a family member, especially if the family member was in a situation where death may be near?
Or even if they deleted the e-mails, I'm sure they replied to them first, so maybe they have copies in their Sent folder.
It takes two people to e-mail, and even if Yahoo! won't release the e-mails I'm sure the OTHER end of the conversation may be more willing to do so.
This means 2 things
- Since it wasn't a password that was easy to guess, it should be assumed that the son wanted it private
...
- 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.
My son has done three tours in the middle East. My husband and I treasured every email that he was able to send, read and reread them and kept them in a special folder with his name. He sent us what he wanted us to know. If he had been killed, I would have respected his right of privacy. The other emails, I'm sure, have to do with gaming, interactions with his friends and military humor (not always tasteful). While getting the other emails may have been nice, anything he wanted us to see he would have forwarded. There is much going on over there that he will not tell us, even now that he is back. I would not have fought the deletion of the emails out of respect and love for my son. I question why it is so important to the family to get the emails.
No, posting a copyright notice does not make it copyrighted. Anything you create is already your copyright.
Posting a copyright notice is the equivalent of posting a "private poroperty" sign. The property was already private, you're just letting folks know it.
Emails are like letters, and letters are property
of the estate. Unless there are specific instructions to the contrary(like in a will)...your heirs should get your emails like any other document.
The privacy claim of yahoo is nonsense, the click through is standard boilerplate and is not intended to supersede the rights of heirs.
The post office cannot withhold your mail from your heirs, what gives yahoo that right?
This problem arised because the dead soldier's parents do not understand the proper way to use a free e-mail account.
All of the messages that the parents want to retrieve from Yahoo had been already sent by their son, or already sent to their son. In either case, the parents had a copy of the message at some point in the past, and they chose not to save it and back it up properly.
Instead, the parents assumed that Yahoo was a reliable archive for old e-mail messages -- which is very risky considering that Yahoo is a FREE service. If those e-mail messages were REALLY that important to them, then they would have ensured that they were backed up properly.
I'm sorry for their heartache, but it's the same heartache that millions of people experience every year when they lose their important documents or priceless photos or whatever, because they didn't understand the importance of making backups.
Hmm...I don't think what you spend your time doing defines wether you are an adult either. On the flip side, does something more refined such as "Spending time reading history books" make someone an adult in your mind?
To me, it has more to do with culpability. A 35 y/o who spends his time drinking and partying is as much an adult as the 24 y/o who cures cancer. Being adult is not about "how good a person" you are, but simply a state of "ok, now you are old enough to be fully responsible for your actions, good or bad". I think you reach that somewhere around 14-16.
As for the issue of so many 18-20 y/o's not being very responsible, that has more to do with how they are/were raised. When kids aren't given any responsibility, they never get responsible.
A modern day witchhunt.
I wonder if the family had tried to reset his password. I just tried with my yahoo account. It asked me for my birthdate, zip code, and what country I was in, and the yahoo ID. Then I clicked next. Then it asked me a question, which I gave the matching answer to, and it reset my password. Has the family not tried just going through this process?
E-mails are not like letters. Letters have a physical component. E-mails have a physical component only if they are downloaded to a disk, which the deceased did not do for whatever reason. If he had downloaded the e-mails, the family would have the rights to that physical property. He did not.
To further blow away your "e-mail = mail" misconception, read about your employer's ability to snoop through your e-mail. Opening somebody else's mail is a crime, but e-mail lacks this protection.
Let us not forget the other parties involved, either... Everybody who sent him e-mail, or received e-mail from him, also has a right to privacy. This right will be violated if Yahoo gives the family access to those e-mails.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
You replied:
I'm sure it's been the target of a few crackers, and they haven't gotten into it either. My daughter and I were having a discussion about passwords, and she told me about how her password was impossible for anyone to guess - so I told her what her password was. Freaked her out, but if you know someone, you can usually guess their password with a few tries.
That the father was unable to says two things - 1) the password was not easy to guess, even by a family member, and 2) it was not intended to be easy to guess by a family member. He DID email them stuff he wanted them to see. So its safe to assume that he DIDN'T email them stuff he didn't want them to see.
You wrote:
Unless the house is specifically willed to me, or there is some legal provision that I get it, then I have no right to it.
I certainly don't have a right to the pay-per-view tv service that they subscribed to. The webmail is a service, not property. The only "property" (the servers, etc) is that which belongs to Yahoo!
I wrote:
You replied:
He is no more the owner of the account than he would become the owner to a pay-tv subscription service, or an internet service, or any other service.
I wrote:
You replied:
No, email is NOT like postcards. You need a user name and password to access my email, even though it's stored in plaintext. If it's "just like a postcard", why is the father whining (because that's what he's doing) about not being able to read it? Answer - because it's NOT "just like a postcard".
You continued:
Hey, RTFA - He DID send stuff to his parents, in plain text, over the internet. It is not Yahoo!'s job to determine the reasons why he didn't send other stuff to them, or to second-guess the account-holder's wishes.
I concluded:
You replied:
What - now I'm going to have to worry that agreements I enter into will be modified posthumously and/or by relatives who "think" they know my wishes better than I do?
If I was Yahoo!, at this point, I'd do the following, so as to assure my 40 million other users that the TOS they agreed to WILL be respected:
IANAL but I've checked the terms of service in yahoo mail's server and I think yahoo is doing the right thing.
Assuming those terms did not change because of this mess, J. Ellsworth should have read this paragraph:
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.
It should be logical to assume that he did not want that mail to be revealed to the public (he wouldn't have chosen yahoo mail if that was the case).
If he did want his mail to be disclosed, he should have had some sort of escrow account (that's one of the things the cc header is for anyway).
The interesting thing is that the family is in a tight spot right now. If they do not prove him dead, they have no right to access his account. His father is definitely committing some sort of crime if he's hacking his account. If they prove he's dead by presenting a death certificate, yahoo could immediately block the account and erase the mail, and that would be ok (if they have not done yet, it is pretty evident he is dead now).
I haven't though of that, but I wouldn't want anybody messing with certain things (like my mail or my private key) when I die, especially if I can easily set up some escrow system in advance (like he should have done if he really wanted his folks to access his mail, after all he wasn't going to a picnic, and he knew it).
Yes, I'm being really blunt, but diplomacy is not one of my strong points (and it's too damn hot in here, so I'm not in my best mood).
GPG 0x1B479C78
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