This photo is licensed Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 2.0 Generic

My research on digital legacy issues over the last 18-months has led me to explore the area of content ownership, copyright, data portability and that dry, dusty thing that everything online has: Terms of Service.

When was the last time you read the TOS of Twitter, Gmail or Facebook (whose TOS has more words than the U.S. Constitution)?

Chances are very good that you’ve never read the legalese that is buried in the bowels of the least-frequented pages of a service. These backwaters are often filled with paragraphs in ALL CAPS, a contractual practice that predates the connotation of yelling online, yet still makes me think a lawyer is vigourously wagging a finger at me.

Let me save you some moments of your life that you’ll never get back. Here’s the gist of what most TOS contain:

You’ve just signed away the exclusive rights to your content.

You may still own the copyright. You may still own the intellectual property. But, that service where you just clicked “I Agree” upon sign up can likely do what they want with your stuff, without compensation, in perpetuity.

Will they actually use it?  Will they profit from it? Will they use it in a way that is not how you wish it to be represented?

Maybe not. But, you need to be aware that they now have the legal right to.

What does it mean for business and marketing?

Let’s talk photo sharing for a moment. Say you are a professional photographer and you use Flickr because you know you can set the level of copyright from All Rights Reserved to a very open and flexible Creative Commons license, depending on your needs and intent.

Did you know that by simply sharing a link to your photo on Twitter its content now falls under their TOS, regardless of the TOS of the service your photo resides? And that they can sub-license it?

Neither did I. Until I read this post.

This means you can no longer legally sell exclusive rights to anything you link to on Twitter.

Is Twitter Evil?

If they are, then so are thousands of other online services. I don’t believe that someone at Twitter is masterminding profiting from your linked content. It’s simply a case of services needing to cover their digital behinds. In comparison to analog printed works, where the process itself made content scarce, and therefore, containable, the flow of data is raging torrent that’s out of control.

Without this type of TOS, would Twitter be open to rights infringement simply by displaying the link to your content? What if your tweet, and its associated content on Twitpic or Flickr, were featured on CNN? Without the right to sub-license it, is it conceivable that you could sue Twitter? Possibly.

The letter of the law has not caught up with the sharing frenzy that is inherent to web 2.0. My feeling is that it will take nothing short of a revolution to change the status quo so that we control exclusive rights to our data.

Call me a cynic, but, more likely exclusivity is lost. Revolutions take passion and ignorance is bliss.

Once again, I am looking forward to a weekend full of tech, social media and great discussions around digital communications and community. There will be 3 tracks of presentations this year; 2 in French, 1 in English.

I’m privileged to be speaking once again. I’ll be presenting a session that is specifically targeted to digital content creators, and is part of my digital legacy series:

Your Web Content : Forever or Fragile?
In the last 15 years we’ve converted analog to digital and put everything on the Web and told that it will be there forever. What if we’re wrong?

Sunday, September 12, 2010
9:30  AM
Chaufferie (hidden away at 175, avenue du Président-Kennedy)
Google Map

The full weekend schedule, including information about Friday’s first ever MediaCamp and the kick off party is here.

Can’t make it to PodCamp Montreal? Check the session schedule to see which sessions will be live streamed to the Internet. (Yes, mine will be.)

Thanks to the PodCamp organizing team Michelle Sullivan, Sylvain Grand’Maison, Laurent Lasalle and Laurent Maisonnave who have done a great job pulling this event together.

Register here.

Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age evolved through speaking sessions that I’ve been doing over that the last year. It is particularly relevant to content creators and people who put so much of their work online. (Here’s Wikipedia about the possibility of a digital dark age.)

Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age

Here’s the session description:

Many think that the web is forever and our personal stories, work and files will live on stored on hard drives and online. Driven by low cost storage, easy distribution and social networks we’ve put our lives online at an amazing pace and converted analog to digital. But, are we inadvertently creating a digital dark age?

In the last 15-years, online photo and video sites, blogs, email and hard drives full of files have replaced the previous generation’s analog heirlooms.

Looking at an old family album from 1910, you’ll be able to view the photos today. Will your descendants be able to see your digital pictures 100 years from now?

The web is actually a fragile place where your digital life’s work and can disappear without warning. Stored data can suffer from digital obsolescence and become unusable.

To prevent the loss of historically significant records and collections, library and archival organizations have been working on digital preservation issues for years.

You may not be a person destined for the history books, but, to your family, friends, colleagues and descendants, your stories and work are just as important, and possibly even more relevant.

This session will look at what each of us can do today to preserve and pass on our digital legacy, how to determine what to save, what steps have happened at the institutional level and determine how they can be adapted for individuals.

If you are a prolific digital creator, this is a must attend session.

Five Questions Answered

1. Why won’t my digital content be safe forever on the Internet?
2. Isn’t the Internet Archive keeping everything?
3. Why is the archive of files on my hard drive/CD/DVDs at risk?
4. My data is insignificant. Why would anyone care about it in the future?
5. How do I ensure that my important digital files survive me?

SXSW VOTING

Here’s how the voting works:

• 30% Community Voting (that’s YOU); 30% SXSW Staff Picks; 40% SXSW Advisory Board Picks
• Voting runs from August 9  to 27, 2010
• First 200 sessions are announced September 20, with more following on November 8

To vote:

• Before Friday, August 27, 2010 go to PanelPicker.sxsw.com a
• click “Sign In” at the top right of the page
• If you have never registered on SXSW.com before, click “create a new account” and fill out the simple form
• Once you are logged into the PanelPicker, you can click here to get to my session, or navigate alphabetically to Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Age to vote.

Thank you for your support. See you at SXSW Interactive 2011!

Twitter Recommends Dead Friends

On July 30th, Twitter announced that it was releasing a feature to recommend friends to follow right on the sidebar of the site when you log into Twitter.com. It was only a matter of time before their Who to Follow algorithm turned up someone who had passed away.

My friend Dean Whitbread, @dfrw, alerted me this morning that upon logging in and seeing this feature for the very first time, he was disturbed to see his friend Ro, @lilyhill,  recommended as someone to follow. She had died unexpectedly of a stroke in May 2009. Two days later, Ro’s daughter used her mom’s cell phone to text a last message to the account to notify @lilyhill’s friends of her passing.

Continue reading Twitter Recommends Dead Friends at DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com.

But nothing brings home the purpose of my research more than when I speak with the bereaved who are struggling with a loved one’s digital remains or those who are pondering their digital legacy while facing a terminal illness. It’s been a privilege and a gift to speak with them.

Like on this blog, I haven’t been posting much to DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com, which I launched in January. I make my living as an Integrated Marketing Consultant, which means supporting my clients is always my top priority. I fit the digital legacy work in around that schedule and makes for some long days.

In my limited time for digital legacy, I’ve given nine different presentations this past year, including speaking at the mesh Conference and webcom Montreal.

I was sponsored to attend SXSW Interactive to gather information on the developments in the area and attend sessions that were related. Of note were two stand out core conversations,  Your Online Identity After Death and Digital Wills given by Corvida Raven and Become Immortal: Understanding the Digital Afterlife presented by Evan Carroll and John Romano from The Digital Beyond, which was received the 12th highest feedback rating out of all the SXSW Interactive sessions this year.

With the rise of online social networks, mainstream media have picked up interest in what happens to our data when we pass away. In the last 12-months I was fortunate to receive quite a bit of media attention through interviews and speaking coverage. I’ve been quoted in The New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and on the IFC. Nationally, I have been featured in pieces in the Canadian Press, CanWest Global newspapers, the Financial Post, and GetConnected, a nationally syndicated technology radio show. There’s been lots of other mainstream media coverage, as well as legal, financial, technology and college blogs. (More clippings are listed here and here.)

I offer my sincerest thanks to everyone who has shared their stories with me and took the time over the last year for me to interview them about their experiences or expertise. You’ve given the fuel for my research. And my thanks to the media, bloggers and conference producers who’ve taken an interest, and especially to everyone who has come to my presentations – you’ve given me so much encouragement to continue.

Yesterday I submitted a proposal to speak at next year’s SXSW Interactive entitled,  Avoiding Extinction in a Digital Dark Age, and focuses on the archival and preservation of personal digital files, whether online or stored on hard drives and other media. This session is geared towards content creators and addresses individuals who are looking at ways to ensure their digital legacy survives file format obsolescence and storage media degredation. Voting, which accounts for 30%, will begin on August 9th. I’ll keep you posted and hope that you’ll help out by casting a vote my way.

I’m proud of what I’ve accomplished in this field in the last year and look forward to another year of exciting developments. My challenges will be to take the research and interviews that I’ve done and synthesize them into writing and presentations on a variety of aspects and approaches to the topic, while still keeping things hopping on the marketing consulting side.

I hope that you’ll come along for the ride.

Subscribe to: http://DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com
Follow on Twitter: @DigitalLegacy

I’m pleased to announce the launch of DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com.

Since first starting to explore this subject more than two years ago, I’ve realized that it stretches wider than I ever could have imagined. As I delved deeper, questions surrounding law, security, privacy, bereavement, preservation, development, and even immortality came to the forefront.

Speaking at PodCamp Montreal last September proved to me that digital legacy issues can be a revelation to people when they stop to consider it. That session really ramped up interest in this topic and led to interviews with the New York Times and others, additional speaking opportunities, and people stepping forward to share their stories with me about death, the digital world and its personal impact on them.

I plan on continuing to research, write and speak about this important topic. But, I am sensitive to the fact that people who come to this blog looking for marketing and technology related posts may not always appreciate hearing about death or the issues surrounding it. It’s not a subject for all moods or all people.

So, if you have an interest in digital legacy, digital afterlife, digital immortality or related issues, and wonder about what you need to consider for the future, I welcome your perspective at DeathAndDigitalLegacy.com. To get you started, there are two new posts over there:

What is a Digital Executor?
HOW TO: Use Gmail For Digital Executor Instructions and Access

And  now we’ll return to our regularly scheduled programming.

Yesterday The New York Times ran the interview I did about The Digital Afterlife and the need to appoint a digital executor:

Internet Protocol is Jenna Wortham‘s advice column for technology. The question was:

Not to be morbid, but I have a lot of private information and details stored on my computer — in various Google Chat logs, e-mail and social networking accounts — that I wouldn’t want to be revealed when I log off for good. Who should I consult or what do I need to do to ensure my cache is cleared and e-mail and social networking sites accounts are deleted when I die?

This person wants to keep private things quiet. Perhaps they have another online persona or have made some online indiscretions or simply don’t want their family to know about certain dealings?

Things become much more complicated in attempting to keep this secret after they pass. Although there are automated services to notify your friends on social networks or selected individuals of your passing, in the case above, you’d still have to rely on someone to access your computer if you want your cache or sensitive files deleted. Yes, you’d need the digital equivalent of a “porn buddy” to wipe your computer clean of sensitive information, from financial information to, well, porn.

You can read my advice on appointing a digital executor here. What would you advise?

Have you appointed a digital executor to keep your online digital legacy alive? What about someone to delete private information from your computer or from online? Have you thought about it at all?

Let me know what you think.

This morning, news spread of the murder of Montreal blogger Renée Wathelet (@endirectdesiles). A fixture in the community, Renée fell in love with Mexico’s Isla Mujeres and moved there last year March. Although, we spoke on Twitter a few times, I only met her once, when she was in town for a visit last February and* came to Twestival.

So many people here loved Renée and were close to her. Many of those same people may be attending PodCamp Montreal. And so, I questioned whether I should cancel my session out of respect to her grieving friends. But, after consideration, I’m going ahead with the session in honour of all that Renée has created and her own digital legacy.

So, if you are interested in the topic of Death and Digital Legacy, I encourage you to attend my session. It will be a round table discussion and participation is encouraged. I will not be making a formal presentation, but instead will share stories that illustrate different discussion points. Some of these may include:

• how do communities mourn online?
• what are the policies of online social sites for families to access loved ones’ accounts?
• do you need a digital trustee named in your will?
• what are some of the new services that have started to manage digital legacy?
• what are the hazards of dormant accounts, whether the user is deceased or not?

I hope to see you there.

Saturday, September 19, 2009
2:30 PM
DE3225
UQAM Design Centre
1440 rue Sanguinet
Montreal

*UPDATE 9/21/09: For more about Renée Wathelet, her friend and YulBiz founder Philippe Martin was interviewed about her on Montreal radio (in French) on 9/21. Listen here.

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Posts Mortem: Death and Digital Legacy

If you passed away today, how would your online friends find out? Should logins and passwords be in your will? Has technology changed mourning? Will your digital media stay online forever? Our lives are lived and documented online, it’s time to talk about the implications of death and digital legacy.

Some of the questions that the panel will seek to discuss are:

1. If you passed away, how would your online friends be notified?
2. Should logins and passwords be included in your will?
3. Would you want your digital presence to remain online forever?
4. What the policies of the major social networks for profile access by the family of the deceased?
5. What are the repercussions of the phenomenon of the suicide note as Facebook status?
6. How has the Internet changed how people come together to mourn?
7. Will pre-programmed updates from friends who have passed give them digital immortality?
8. How have recent celebrity deaths brought digital mourning to the mainstream?
9. If digital profiles truly have inherent value and equity, can they be bequeathed?
10. What societal shifts will be required to handle ownership of our online footprints?

In the coming weeks I’ll be addressing some of these questions and seeking feedback. I want to know your personal experience and thoughts on these questions. Have I missed something that you’d like to see discussed? Then, please let me know in the comments.

My thanks to the ever-clever Ike Pigott for coining “posts mortem” and allowing me to use it in my title. My thanks also to all of those who’ve had conversations with me about different aspects of this topic. Your perspectives enrich the discussion.

Panel voting ends on September 4th. I appreciate your support and thank you for your vote.

————-

Some of my colleagues at Technically Women have also submitted panels to SXSW Interactive, outlined in today’s post. Please consider voting for theirs as well:

Maggie Fox
Scaling Social Media: Getting Credible Content to Mass Audiences
News 2.0 – How Old Media Companies Are Inventing New Models

Rachel Happe
Building Social Strategies at Fortune 100 Companies

Jennifer Leggio
Inherent Dangers of Real-Time Social Networking
How (Not) to Get Banned on Social Networks!

Shireen Mitchell
Is There A Technological Fix for Human Behavior?
Social Media Women of Color

And I’m certain that many more of my colleagues and friends on Twitter are on the SXSW PanelPicker. Please feel free to add your session link in the comments.