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Why not pay a notary to store your will or a bank safe ? I mean you re inventing solutions to problems we always solved with a fee and a legally binding contra

Why not pay a notary to store your will or a bank safe ? I mean you re inventing solutions to problems we always solved with a fee and a legally binding contract...

WorldMaker 5y ago
Related to this, I briefly explored the idea of digital secret sharing tech for lawyers/notaries to use as a service in Estate Planning. Certainly not "zero trust" and you'd still want the usual YGWYPF and contract law to back it up. Ran into some huge hurdles. The idea was to be a somewhat safer "digital escrow" ("safety deposit box") in the cloud providing artifacts that could be placed in wills or real world safety deposit boxes. The first and obvious being generally lawyers aren't as tech savvy as they should be and building a good UX for that is likely a very hard problem. (But the real problem I got into in casual conversations picking lawyer brains to see if there was a viable MVP to try to build was what I felt to be the real serious Digital Escrow whammy that we're going to maybe need decades to fix: digital goods survivorship isn't an established right. Most Terms of Service agreements forbid, indirectly or directly giving someone else your password. Worse, many Terms of Services explicitly are being written between only one specific individual and the company and have clauses that terminate with the individual. A lawyer asked to write a password into an estate plan doesn't have to think about what it protects and doesn't need to know and passwords on paper stored in a safety deposit box are mostly covered/secured by existing contract law and insurance and all that. [But also you can't update that password without the rigmarole of paying the lawyer to open the file in the safety deposit box and updating the document.] But even in just casual conversations, asking if password and digital "item" storage/escrow as a service was useful to lawyers led them down into frightening rabbit holes that Digital Estate Planning is a giant mess, the contracts [Terms of Services] are nightmares, most companies don't want to consider digital goods as inheritable goods, and the legal fights over inheritance rights of things like Steam accounts or Movies Anywhere or Kindle accounts are just waiting to happen and lawyers would generally prefer to ostrich that as long as possible unless someone pays them heavily or someone else sets a good first precedent. I still think about some of these problems and how unprepared we currently are with respect to "digital goods".)
- still_grokking 5y ago
  In civilized parts of the world such clauses in the TOS just don't bear any legal meaning. Simple as that. Your heirs are entitled to your past belongings. That includes of course all kinds of online accounts.
  - WorldMaker 5y ago
    "Civilized parts of the world" haven't got around to actually encoding such regulations into laws, much less enforcing them in courts of law. (Again, there are legal battles that likely need to happen, and it is a surprise that some of them already haven't happened, and there is concern that the longer we wait without preparing for those legal battles the rougher it will be to fight them.) The closest a regulation to date I'm aware of has gotten to addressing digital goods and especially survivorship was the EU's GDPR mentioned it explicitly as a concern and then kicked the can down the road with no solution offered, leaving it someone else's problem. All across the "civilized parts of the world" HN is full of horror story headlined about people and small businesses losing access to all of their Google Docs and entire Google Drive folders on which their homes or businesses ran because of a spam judgment from YouTube. How many of those have gone to court? Contract law is the law of the land in most "civilized parts of the world" and the Terms of Service are the only contracts and the only laws we have in most cases in the digital world. Those Terms of Service say that your Google account is entirely at Google's discretion, full stop, and that's the current "law". If lawyers don't think they can fight or appeal a company losing their Google account and going bankrupt because of that because the Terms of Service say "Google is always right", how do you expect them to fight for Grandpa's Steam account? You can believe all you want that "common sense" dictates that anything you should be able to inherit physically you should be able to inherit digitally, but that's not what the laws currently say. Those clauses in the TOS agreements are the only laws in most of the "civilized parts of the world" on the record right now, because it's not a problem any legislature has wanted to address. And they have plenty of lobbyists in their ears telling them it isn't a problem they need to address. Disney makes more money if your heirs have to "buy" all the movies in the Disney Vault again when your Movies Anywhere account gets shut down at your death, just like everyone needed to buy the movies on VHS and then DVD and then Blu-Ray… (This is overwrought example because Movies Anywhere TOS actually seems concerned about this and has made steps for more "family sharing" and some of that hints at survivorship planning and how they hope that to work. To be fair, so is Steam more than "average". But that also underscores my point in a different way: right now your rights are entirely dependent on the Terms of Service of the digital services you use and no two TOS documents are the same and nearly every one of them is going in different directions based on different corporate lawyer priorities and corporate/shareholder greed/"charity". Everything is at the discretion of whichever corporate overlords you rely on.) Nothing is guaranteed even in the "civilized parts of the world" until there are a lot more court cases backing up one side or the other with enough precedence to swing contract law interpretations or a lot more consumer protection advocates managed to get meaningful laws actually enacted about digital goods rights/survivorship. Not just GDPR levels of "some countries in the EU see this is a potential problem but not enough of them yet for us to do anything about it yet". Right now the consensus seems to be "that's someone else's problem" and "we'll worry about that tomorrow", especially in "civilized parts of the world". Like I said, I've had more than one conversation with Lawyers about this picking their brains on it. Anecdotally, their terror that none of this is getting addressed was very real. I don't think a lot of people know how bad this might get, that this is a legal hurricane no one wants to pretend exists on the radar.

Why not pay a notary to store your will or a bank safe ? I mean you re inventing solutions to problems we always solved with a fee and a legally binding contract...

WorldMaker 5y ago

Related to this, I briefly explored the idea of digital secret sharing tech for lawyers/notaries to use as a service in Estate Planning. Certainly not "zero trust" and you'd still want the usual YGWYPF and contract law to back it up. Ran into some huge hurdles. The idea was to be a somewhat safer "digital escrow" ("safety deposit box") in the cloud providing artifacts that could be placed in wills or real world safety deposit boxes. The first and obvious being generally lawyers aren't as tech savvy as they should be and building a good UX for that is likely a very hard problem. (But the real problem I got into in casual conversations picking lawyer brains to see if there was a viable MVP to try to build was what I felt to be the real serious Digital Escrow whammy that we're going to maybe need decades to fix: digital goods survivorship isn't an established right. Most Terms of Service agreements forbid, indirectly or directly giving someone else your password. Worse, many Terms of Services explicitly are being written between only one specific individual and the company and have clauses that terminate with the individual. A lawyer asked to write a password into an estate plan doesn't have to think about what it protects and doesn't need to know and passwords on paper stored in a safety deposit box are mostly covered/secured by existing contract law and insurance and all that. [But also you can't update that password without the rigmarole of paying the lawyer to open the file in the safety deposit box and updating the document.] But even in just casual conversations, asking if password and digital "item" storage/escrow as a service was useful to lawyers led them down into frightening rabbit holes that Digital Estate Planning is a giant mess, the contracts [Terms of Services] are nightmares, most companies don't want to consider digital goods as inheritable goods, and the legal fights over inheritance rights of things like Steam accounts or Movies Anywhere or Kindle accounts are just waiting to happen and lawyers would generally prefer to ostrich that as long as possible unless someone pays them heavily or someone else sets a good first precedent. I still think about some of these problems and how unprepared we currently are with respect to "digital goods".)

still_grokking 5y ago
In civilized parts of the world such clauses in the TOS just don't bear any legal meaning. Simple as that. Your heirs are entitled to your past belongings. That includes of course all kinds of online accounts.
- WorldMaker 5y ago
  "Civilized parts of the world" haven't got around to actually encoding such regulations into laws, much less enforcing them in courts of law. (Again, there are legal battles that likely need to happen, and it is a surprise that some of them already haven't happened, and there is concern that the longer we wait without preparing for those legal battles the rougher it will be to fight them.) The closest a regulation to date I'm aware of has gotten to addressing digital goods and especially survivorship was the EU's GDPR mentioned it explicitly as a concern and then kicked the can down the road with no solution offered, leaving it someone else's problem. All across the "civilized parts of the world" HN is full of horror story headlined about people and small businesses losing access to all of their Google Docs and entire Google Drive folders on which their homes or businesses ran because of a spam judgment from YouTube. How many of those have gone to court? Contract law is the law of the land in most "civilized parts of the world" and the Terms of Service are the only contracts and the only laws we have in most cases in the digital world. Those Terms of Service say that your Google account is entirely at Google's discretion, full stop, and that's the current "law". If lawyers don't think they can fight or appeal a company losing their Google account and going bankrupt because of that because the Terms of Service say "Google is always right", how do you expect them to fight for Grandpa's Steam account? You can believe all you want that "common sense" dictates that anything you should be able to inherit physically you should be able to inherit digitally, but that's not what the laws currently say. Those clauses in the TOS agreements are the only laws in most of the "civilized parts of the world" on the record right now, because it's not a problem any legislature has wanted to address. And they have plenty of lobbyists in their ears telling them it isn't a problem they need to address. Disney makes more money if your heirs have to "buy" all the movies in the Disney Vault again when your Movies Anywhere account gets shut down at your death, just like everyone needed to buy the movies on VHS and then DVD and then Blu-Ray… (This is overwrought example because Movies Anywhere TOS actually seems concerned about this and has made steps for more "family sharing" and some of that hints at survivorship planning and how they hope that to work. To be fair, so is Steam more than "average". But that also underscores my point in a different way: right now your rights are entirely dependent on the Terms of Service of the digital services you use and no two TOS documents are the same and nearly every one of them is going in different directions based on different corporate lawyer priorities and corporate/shareholder greed/"charity". Everything is at the discretion of whichever corporate overlords you rely on.) Nothing is guaranteed even in the "civilized parts of the world" until there are a lot more court cases backing up one side or the other with enough precedence to swing contract law interpretations or a lot more consumer protection advocates managed to get meaningful laws actually enacted about digital goods rights/survivorship. Not just GDPR levels of "some countries in the EU see this is a potential problem but not enough of them yet for us to do anything about it yet". Right now the consensus seems to be "that's someone else's problem" and "we'll worry about that tomorrow", especially in "civilized parts of the world". Like I said, I've had more than one conversation with Lawyers about this picking their brains on it. Anecdotally, their terror that none of this is getting addressed was very real. I don't think a lot of people know how bad this might get, that this is a legal hurricane no one wants to pretend exists on the radar.