Newly Passed Oklahoma Bill No. 2800 Grants Estate Executors Control of Digital Assets
By Jesse Davis on Dec 9 th, with 2 COMMENTS
As mentioned in a previous post, Oklahoma recently passed a groundbreaking new law that allows estate executors to take control of the recently deceased’s online accounts. This bill is monumental for estate planning, but its ramifications on future Internet and Social Networking law may be just as important. This law is going directly against the Terms of Service for most Internet account service providers, such as Facebook, who claim that they own the rights to practically anything its users post on the site. This law is saying the contents within any given account such as a Facebook account are in fact the property of the users themselves.
Bill No. 2800, is sponsored by Rep. Ryan Kiesel, and Dorman and Murphey of the House and Rice of the Senate. It reads:
Section 1. NEW LAW. A new section of law to be codified in the Oklahoma Statutes as Section 269 of Title 58, unless there is created a duplication in numbering, reads as follow:
The executor or administrator of an estate shall have the power, where otherwise authorized, to take control of, conduct, continue, or terminate any accounts of a deceased person on any social networking site, any micro blogging or short message service website or any email service website.
December 09, 2010 at 7:06 pm, Jesse Davis said:
RT @entrustet: Newly Passed Oklahoma Bill No. 2800 Grants Estate Executors Control of Digital Assets http://bit.ly/giNLww
March 31, 2011 at 12:42 am, SXSWi: You’re Dead, Your Data Isn’t: What Happens Now? - Spellbound Blog said:
[...] access to digital content after the death of the original account holder. Oklahoma recently passed a law that permits estate executors to access the online accounts of the recently deceased – the [...]