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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. Tha

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.
- still_grokking 5y ago
  Thank you for stating this different view point! Maybe the "civilized parts of the world" are much smaller than I assumed? That may be. I did not double check. :-D At least in Germany there is a highest court ruling that deals with this subject. https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/facebook-konto-erben-tod-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/facebook-konto-erben-to... Usually the status quo is not substantially different in other EU countries, so I assumed that. TOS in general are always limited by other laws. That something is written in the TOS doesn't make it a binding contract automatically. (A related and one of the better know cases is that EULA-like "contracts", that aren't shown to users before they install a software, aren't contracts at all in Germany—as you need consent form all parties upfront to establish a contract. If you didn't see any contract and didn't agree to it upfront there is just no contract. That's why it's legal in Germany for example to sell OEM licenses of MS products even the MS EULA "forbids" this. It doesn't matter Microsoft says the EULA is enforced by their TOS). It's not much different regarding other things written in TOS: You can just ignore those things in case such clauses would give the service provider unexpected or overly broad advantages (like trying to make a "contract" binding you never saw). Such clauses don't have any legal meaning and aren't enforceable. Of course it's not always clear form the get go which kind of clauses are moot. That's up to the courts to decided if there is disagreement. But for a lot of things there are court rulings, and most of the time it's even quite clear from the laws governing TOS in general. (A clause like "by using our service we're entitled to your first-born" can for example never be a binding part of a TOS; no discussion needed). Regarding things like VOD or that-like services: Well, you never bought anything there! You're usually only renting this stuff. Apple got for example sued because they had a "buy" button on movies in Apple TV+ even though you can't "buy" of course any movies on Apple TV+—you can only rent them. Rented stuff doesn't belong to you in the end, so it doesn't get inherited by your heirs. Person-bound contracts are of course possible and such renting contracts are often of this kind. So your heirs don't inherit "your" VOD movies (you've never owned them). Such a contract usually just terminates with the death of the contractor in case this was the only person entitled to use the service. (Like say, in case of a gym contract). If this all is "new problems"—even things are actually quite clear as there are regulations form the analog era governing most of those questions—maybe the parts of the world where this is the case aren't civilized at all?^^ BTW, that's actually why "case law" is nonsense: Given a case law system if something "new", like the internet, comes across "everything" is needed to be reevaluated. If one have laws instead that govern general things and not specific cases you can most of the time just apply the existing laws to the "new" thing without bigger trouble or legal uncertainty. The point here is: Something like contract law is mostly "done". There is almost 3000 years of experience with it. So there are hardly any really "new" things to consider. (At least if you don't have case law—where it's always a new gamble).

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.

still_grokking 5y ago
Thank you for stating this different view point! Maybe the "civilized parts of the world" are much smaller than I assumed? That may be. I did not double check. :-D At least in Germany there is a highest court ruling that deals with this subject. https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/facebook-konto-erben-tod-101.html https://www.tagesschau.de/wirtschaft/facebook-konto-erben-to... Usually the status quo is not substantially different in other EU countries, so I assumed that. TOS in general are always limited by other laws. That something is written in the TOS doesn't make it a binding contract automatically. (A related and one of the better know cases is that EULA-like "contracts", that aren't shown to users before they install a software, aren't contracts at all in Germany—as you need consent form all parties upfront to establish a contract. If you didn't see any contract and didn't agree to it upfront there is just no contract. That's why it's legal in Germany for example to sell OEM licenses of MS products even the MS EULA "forbids" this. It doesn't matter Microsoft says the EULA is enforced by their TOS). It's not much different regarding other things written in TOS: You can just ignore those things in case such clauses would give the service provider unexpected or overly broad advantages (like trying to make a "contract" binding you never saw). Such clauses don't have any legal meaning and aren't enforceable. Of course it's not always clear form the get go which kind of clauses are moot. That's up to the courts to decided if there is disagreement. But for a lot of things there are court rulings, and most of the time it's even quite clear from the laws governing TOS in general. (A clause like "by using our service we're entitled to your first-born" can for example never be a binding part of a TOS; no discussion needed). Regarding things like VOD or that-like services: Well, you never bought anything there! You're usually only renting this stuff. Apple got for example sued because they had a "buy" button on movies in Apple TV+ even though you can't "buy" of course any movies on Apple TV+—you can only rent them. Rented stuff doesn't belong to you in the end, so it doesn't get inherited by your heirs. Person-bound contracts are of course possible and such renting contracts are often of this kind. So your heirs don't inherit "your" VOD movies (you've never owned them). Such a contract usually just terminates with the death of the contractor in case this was the only person entitled to use the service. (Like say, in case of a gym contract). If this all is "new problems"—even things are actually quite clear as there are regulations form the analog era governing most of those questions—maybe the parts of the world where this is the case aren't civilized at all?^^ BTW, that's actually why "case law" is nonsense: Given a case law system if something "new", like the internet, comes across "everything" is needed to be reevaluated. If one have laws instead that govern general things and not specific cases you can most of the time just apply the existing laws to the "new" thing without bigger trouble or legal uncertainty. The point here is: Something like contract law is mostly "done". There is almost 3000 years of experience with it. So there are hardly any really "new" things to consider. (At least if you don't have case law—where it's always a new gamble).