Category Archives: Social Media

Planning for the digital afterlife: What happens to social media accounts after the account holder dies?

Posted on May 1, 2013 | Leave a comment

For many individuals, social media accounts can hold some the most personally valuable intellectual property that the person owns. Photos, videos, written content, online personas (i.e., personal “brands”) — all of these reside in cloud-based servers that are, by design, password-protected and accessible only to the account holder.

When a person dies, the person’s heirs may want to take control of their loved one’s social media accounts to post memorials, information about funeral arrangements and other notices. This activity may or may not be consistent with what the account holder intended to  occur after death. If the person’s will contains detailed instructions and passwords, then the heirs will have a clear direction. However, this is not often the case. Continue reading →

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Posted in Social Media

Bogus legal notice goes viral on Facebook

Posted on November 28, 2012 | Leave a comment

A fake “copyright notice”  has been making the rounds in Facebook posts this week.  The notice attempts to restrict the use of the posting member’s  profile information.  It also encourages other Facebook users to post the notice to their profile.  Quite simply, the notice is a hoax.

The copyright notice meme first made the rounds in Spring 2012, and it returned this month.  Its return prompted Facebook to publish a “fact check” bulletin debunking the hoax by stating: Continue reading →

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Posted in Copyrights, Social Media

Twitter announces new policy to publicize copyright takedown notices

Posted on November 8, 2012 | 4 Comments

Social media service Twitter recently announced a change to its Copyright and DMCA Policy that will result in more publicity for allegations that content posted on Twitter infringes a U.S. copyright law.   This publicity will occur in the allegedly infringing user’s Twitter feed, as well as a third party website that seeks to call attention to overzealous allegations of infringement.

The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (“DMCA”) allows copyright holders who find their content being infringed on the Internet to submit a “takedown notice” in which they demand that the Internet service provider remove the copyrighted material.

Under the Twitter policy, when Twitter removes material an allegedly infringing Tweet or media, it will automatically post a Tweet in the user’s feed, such as the following:

Presumably in an effort to not be viewed as favor one side over the other in the infringement dispute, Twitter will also send a copy of each DMCA takedown request to the Chilling Effects website, where it will be posted for public view.

According to Twitter, the new procedures represent “an effort to be as transparent as possible regarding the removal or restriction of access to user-posted content.”

The Twitter policy follows in the long-lived footsteps of Google, which in 2002 implemented a policy of sharing copies of many DMCA takedown notices to Chilling Effects.

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Posted in Copyrights, Social Media