In times gone by, families would collect books, records and other items over the course of a lifetime. These items would sometimes be passed down from generation to generation, becoming a family legacy. But these days, we consume more and more books, magazines, movies and music digitally. What happens to those when you're gone?
Well if you read the terms & conditions for a lot of the kinds of web sites we buy these things from - Kindle books from Amazon.com, music and videos from iTunes, etc, you don't actually own the content you have paid for. In most cases, you are granted licence to consume this media under a single account. OK, it's not overly difficult to circumvent some of these 'protections' but legally, that stuff just doesn't belong to you.
So as the WSJ asked recently Who inherits your iTunes library?. This stuff in theory could just get lost in the sands of time. There are two takeaways that immediately spring to mind from this:
1 - Should you leave your account passwords with your will so that somebody else can enjoy your collection after you are gone? Maybe there is something in the t's & c's to stop you doing this but it wouldn't be enforceable I wouldn't imagine.
2 - In the case of 'the classics' - in terms of books, at least - most people would probably want a physical copy anyway. The same may well not be true of movies and music, though.
There are a few other important discussions arising from this too. Not least 'ownership' of digital content (as opposed to 'licensing' that we seem to have been duped into), Digital Rights Management (DRM), your digital life in social media, and the question of just who reads those t's & c's anyway?
