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Ask Slashdot: What's the Best Way To Preserve a "Digital Inheritance"?
First time accepted submitter ron-l-j writes "The last few months a digital inheritance idea has been floating around in my head, and I am sure the thought has crossed your mind as well. With Google talking about the inactive account program it made me wonder, how do I make sure my children get my iTunes, and amazon movies? I have plenty of mp4 movies on my server that will just set itself to admin with no password after I do not log in within a 6 month time frame. But what about the huge amount spent on digital content every year? What's the best way to make sure your "digital inheritance" gets passed down?"
I keep all my media files on a shared server. Everyone in my family knows the password.
For all my accounts, I use passwords with the same 6 character prefix, and varying suffixes. The suffixes are listed on an appendix to my will. They are also on an XD card that I keep in this keychain fob in my pocket.
But I only record the suffixes because both my wife and daughter (age 14) know the prefix. So if the prefix were 7xU32w, then the list might say "correct horse battery staple", but the real password would be "7xU32wcorrect horse battery staple". If anyone outside my family saw the password list, it would be worthless to them because they don't know the prefix, nor do they even know that there is a prefix.
Any of it.
Few would care for their parents music collection.
What's the best way to make sure your "digital inheritance" gets passed down?
Put it on physical media and give it to them. Or remove the DRM (if any) and put it on a disc and give it to them. Or (if you're okay with it) move it to a third party pay system like Google Drive where you can make it readable to them. Keep in mind that in doing so you will almost certainly be violating the usage agreement you clicked on with the distributors your got that music from -- in some cases you are violating it two or three different ways in that scenario.
... meh:
This story wasn't true but you'd essentially be facing the same obstacles.
Based on principle that I don't want to get into, I refuse to purchase anything from Apple. So I don't have to deal with that problem. I do make purchase on Amazon, however, whenever a Big Bach box of 100 Bach songs goes on sale for $1. So what I do is I download them all in mp3 and put them out on a redundant SAN in my house. I do this with all books, music and movies -- if I buy the CD or DVD I rip them out to this. If I get a DRM'd ebook, I free it with calibre and put it out there. Pretty sure I'm violating a ton of shit doing this but
2.2 Restrictions. You must comply with all applicable copyright and other laws in your use of the Music Content. Except as set forth in Section 2.1 above, you may not redistribute, transmit, assign, sell, broadcast, rent, share, lend, modify, adapt, edit, license or otherwise transfer or use the Music Content.
Every five years or so I upgrade the drives to medium quality drives that are larger for more storage. So this machine running as an internal server to my home is unencrypted and I can access it with my PS3, Xbox or computer. I will simply hand over that machine and drives to my offspring in my final will and testament.
... I'm sad that I cannot give my children my old Lucas arts games. The media is archaic and my "license" with the company is meaningless more and more each day as Disney dismantles and guts LucasArts. I wrote a journal entry about this in 2006 and it was on the front page but that discussion seems to have been lost to the ages. I'm certainly not the first person to puzzle over this quandary and it will only snowball further and further.
You should honestly still be asking about MMORPG accounts, apps and games that you paid for
My work here is dung.
IANAL, and I haven't checked the license, but I suspect you legally don't own rights that can be passed on upon your death.
Put all of the relevant information in your will, or in a sealed & notarized envelope only to be opened upon your death. Accounts, password, approximate contents, the whole shebang. If you're worried about someone taking this information before you're dead, put in a single account and password to your KeyPass database, or an e-mail account that only has usernames / password, etc. Then, find some way of tracking access to that account, so that it pings you when someone uses it. Heck, even add a 1-week timer to it, so that they have to be sure you're dead before they can get those passwords.
Basically, rely on the systems we've always used to pass along our inheritance.
Cynical Idealist
I bet Hollywood and the RIAA would like to assume you'll make the only sensible option and inform your beneficiaries to use your life insurance to repurchase all such content you think you own.
There are two ways that I can think of. The first is to just list all the titles, and then provide a link to the Pirate Bay. You could even save them time and torrent the titles yourself first.
The second is to provide your password (e.g. in an encrypted container, with the password to that in your will) and hope that the companies will not realize you are dead. I know, maybe a better idea would be to stop licensing stuff and actually outright buy it. Buy DRM free, and you can make a copy yourself. Don't purchase anything that requires DRM or whatever.
The third way (which doesn't do what you ask) is to just forget it. Just set it to die when you do.
Also, just delete all the porn. I'm sure your kids don't want to know what sort of weird stuff you are into.
HELP MY ACCOUNT HAS BEEN HACKED BY AN ILLIBERAL ART STUDENT SET TO DESTROY THE INTERWEBZ!
The problem is the concept of the license instead of the purchase. The media companies want to get away from the idea that you 'own' anything. In order to do that with the shift to digital goods they 'license' everything. This way when you die they can claim that all of your purchases were in fact not purchases but in effect lifelong rental agreements. Your heirs get nothings and all of the money you spent becomes wasted.
There are two potential ways too challenge this. Someone could list a large number of digital assets in a bankruptcy case and get the trustee to challenge the idea that they cannot be sold. To the best of my knowledge the only time this came up it was settled out of court without setting precedent. The other way is to have the trustee of someone's estate challenge this when you die. The bottom line is that you have to have enough digital assets for the trustee to feel that it is worth their time and money to fight over. Since most people only have a couple grand or so in digital assets it usually isn't worth the court costs to try to recover them.
The practical alternative is to include your account password in your will so that your heirs can log into your account and use it after you pass away.
The account would still have to be in your name and the company would have to believe you were still alive.
Well, that's easy. Incorporate and have Anonymous Coward, Inc. buy all your music and movies and such for you. Pass on the corporation and its assets in your will.
Undeath: Not just for soulless corporations and liches anymore!
If I have been able to see further than others, it is because I bought a pair of binoculars.
I buy all my stuff on physical CDs and DVDs/Blu-Ray discs and then rip it (in the case of my music) for a few reasons, but this is a big one.
If ever I want to give away the media, I can - whether I'm alive or dead. No confusion, no complication.
Consider your IRA, 401k, etc. holdings. Unless your spouse or heirs know the passwords to all your Fidelity/Putnam/Vanguard/Hancock accounts, it'll be a major pain to get at your money. Heck, what with all-electronic statements and stuff, it may be really difficult just to find out your accounts exist (and their numbers).
https://app.box.com/WitthoftResume Code: https://github.com/cellocgw
The days of family photos being passed down are gone. A shoe-box full of slides is remarkable durable, barring a fire. When grandma dies her collection of digital photos dies with her. While perhaps no exactly a "first world problem" it's a pretty significant issue when you consider the amount of history that can be lost. It's especially important to artists. Imagine if all of art produced by the likes of Picaso, Rembrandt, Van Gogh vanished when the died and someone shut down their computers. Most archival media available is susceptible to silent bit rot and spinning media requires care as well.
Solving Unix problems since 1989...
... in a manner of speaking. This is a well known problem in crypto.
My way: all of my passwords and secret documents are in an encrypted folder which I update along with my will. Included are final farewells, secrets, where the bodies are buried, and so on. The key is split (look up PKI key splitting) into 5 parts. My girlfriend, father, buddy at work, and two of my friends each have a part. For security reasons, those are just examples. Four of those parts together are required to unlock. At my death each one turns in their part to the executor of my will who already has instructions on how to get it put together.
It is not a good idea to naively split a 10 char password into two 5 char pieces, and assume that brute force will be necessary to guess one of those parts. That is a very dangerous assumption if you are not an expert with the particular algorithms used.
Support microSD: in a post 9/11 world, it is unwise to carry your data on media that you cannot comfortably swallow.
It's down the list, but it's stuff that has value, so it's not that insane.
On the same continuum would be photographs - photographs can have a great deal of historical value, both to a community and to a family. Having some sort of a plan to ensure that they get passed on to someone who will care about having them and value them is a good thing.
Maybe because it's shit music.
I'm counting the number of famous bands from 40 years ago which still are famous versus the number of famous bands from 10-5 years ago which still are famous. The former number is much, much larger than the latter.
The change started around the end of '90s-early 2000s when it became a lot easier to create "immediate" music with close to no skill; before, bands relied on their members' ability to play instruments well and come with imaginative lyrics. After that time threshold ('99-2001) the advance of electronic means to programatically generate music (loops, beats, etc) made it easy to pick a bambi in bikini or mini-skirt, have her yell some meaningless words in a microphone while some sound engineers made the voice sound pretty and others made it match the background generated song, rinse and repeat, publish, see money flowing in like crazy.
That's why I'm stuck to 20th Century in terms of music. I was then mesmerized by the ability of singers to keep a note for 20+ seconds in a live concert, the amazing skills of drummers to bang their drums in a 15+ minutes solo, the incredible features of guitarists to shred notes with ease and all of them kept emotions flowing through me. Now all I see is 4-minute songs which yield ansolutely zero emotion. More tits, less music.
Recently, I briefly enjoyed dubstep (it was something new) and then it became plain and repetitive. Every skillless wannabe jumped the bandwagon and squeezed out the same stuff with minor variations.
...gis sdrawkcab (usually not responding to ACs; don't bother posting as AC)
Think bigger.
1) Your kids probably don't want it. How much of your grandfather's-era of music would you actually listen to? Not much. Sure, they'd like to keep a photo or two for "show-and-tell" but it won't mean much to them later, and 99.9% of what you want to give them, they won't be interested in. When people die, they have a lot of crap to go through, and most of it gets destroyed or sold - nobody keeps EVERYTHING. The first things to go are mass-market commercial items that can easily be replicated / recovered.
2) Your kids won't know what to do with it. It's become hard to play web video from 10-15 years ago (when was the last time you installed Quicktime / Realplayer?). Doesn't matter what you do, they probably won't be able to play it (DRM, etc.) - you can scream open-source all you like, the fact is that by the time they grow up, unless they are as geeky as you, they won't be able to play it.
3) Out of all the crap I could have "inherited", I kept only what was personal and important. There probably *WAS* value in the old 78's that I took to the charity shop, but to be honest, it wasn't sentimental value so who cares? There's no way I could listen to the music on them and tolerate the slow-droning that passed for music back then. And the stuff I did keep was daft, for a reason and - without exception - tangible. There's enough non-tangible stuff in my head from dead people without some "virtual" music that I could pick up in seconds if I really wanted it.
4) When they get older, they'll care less. They will be working and could buy your favourite music on the format of the day for nostalgia, if they wanted it. Chances are they won't dig out the old CD player except to blow the dust off and show the kids how music "used to be" (like previous generations would demonstrate their phonographs etc.). Fast forward a generation and all your Netflix accounts (assuming that company is even AROUND by then) won't mean anything to your family. That favourite movie that they always snuggled up to watch as children? Chances are they don't remember as adults or - if they do - they'd prefer it on a convenient modern format which they would buy themselves anyway.
5) The generation problem. I know things about my grandparents. I know next-to-nothing about my great-grandparents. I'd never seen them, they were dead before I was born. Hence, I don't really have more than a passing interest in them. I know zero about their parents and the further back you go, the less I know and the less I care. I probably *am* related to someone famous at some point - almost everybody is and even simple maths provides the answer - every famous person of ten generations ago probably has nearly a thousand people who can trace their ancestry directly to them today, and millions more whom can get there with third-cousins twice-removed or whatever.
Sure, it'd be cool to have a piece of documentation etc. for filling in a family tree but - thinking about it - my dad probably does have that kind of stuff about his own granddad. But why would he show it to me / pass it to me? I have no connection with the person it came from and it would mean almost nothing.
Now consider what it would mean to see a list of music that your grandfather liked, or your great-grandfather. Now consider how much it would be different to have that music in some online-only account that's tricky to get into (and almost certainly the details will be lost by then), impossible to play if you do, may not even exist any more, etc. It's not as much as you think.
And by then most of that stuff will be so old-hat it won't even be put onto TV / radio as it would have been repeated a billion times and gone through the "gold" nostalgia channels and be next-to-worthless, like asking me to watch something that my great-grandad saw at a music hall. Interesting. Once. For a minute. That's about it.
6) All this effort takes you away from your kids. They honestly won't give a shit beyond lip-service and keeping
That's a good idea, but legally moving the money into the corporation in order to purchase the stuff gets pretty complicated tax-wise. You might want to look at something like an open trust instead. Talk to your tax lawyer. IANAL.
Just because I can hook a shark from a boat, I do no offer to wrestle it in the water.
If all you intend to leave your children is your MP3 collection, then that is pretty sad.
First, don't BUY digital movies. There is no point to it. Even buying physical movies is stupid. Unless you are absolutely going to watch a movie more then 5 - 6 times there is no economic reason to spend $20 - $30 on a movie you are going to watch once or twice. People have this silly notion of collecting content, whether its physical disks or digital files, but it it economically stupid to buy a movie in this day an age of instant access for a few bucks, especially when a year later its on Netflix. There is no reason to spend a fortune accumulating a movie library which its more economical to rent or subscribe to services to access that content on demand, and in the future it will be just easier and cheaper to access movies and TV shows on demand.
When it comes to music there has not been a music service that has forced DRM since iTunes when DRM free about 5 years ago. So you can transfer your music to a hard drive and give them that, assuming they want to listen to 30 year old music.
But I guarantee your children don't care about any movie or music you "owned" when you pass, especially if you unwisely blew through all "their" inheritance money to accumulate it. Buying music or movies is NOT an investment.
Also there is no point to have a crazy scheme to reset passwords on a file system, any content can be "reowned" by a new admin account, also why are you password protecting your movies, just throw them onto a shared family folder anyways.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
I already ran into this with Steam.
When my sons started getting Steam games as gifts, they were too young for their own account (2004?) - they were 7? 8? so I (I guess, stupidly) applied their games to mine, would log on and let them play.
Over the years, we just kept accumulating games, and applying them to "the house account". We did open an extra account once, so we could multiplayer (I think we have Magicka on that one too.), and then (by accident, since 14 year olds are often more interested in getting "that game" installed than thinking about) a couple more games got installed on that account too.
Now they're 17+ and (obviously) have their own accounts.
Unfortunately, I have games and stuff on my account that are technically theirs...Civ5, Magicka and a ton of expansions, Skyrim, etc. I don't play them, I don't want access to them, etc. I'd love to just xfer them to their account, and be done. But right now we basically have to text each other "Dad, you on steam account (X) tonight, or can I play on it?" because we have my (main) account, our other (house) account, and then each of their accounts.
(I tried to raise this concern earlier here, and the Slashmob attacked me for lying, fabricating the situation, and all sorts of things. Not sure why? But I simply doubt many of these services, and certainly Terms, weren't drafted with a 10+ year timeframe expected. Now I am paying the price for not thinking it through, either.)
-Styopa