Capital Entrepreneurs

Capital Entrepreneurs member company Entrustet was featured on Dane 101 about how to protect digital assets in estate plans.  From the link:

Nathan Lustig, co-founder (along with Jesse Davis) of the Madison-based company Entrustet, notes that these ephemeral bits of data are in fact real assets. Some, like PayPal accounts or web pages, have monetary value. Others, like emails from family members and digital images, have “sentimental value. Many children of the born digital generation have never had their photo printed.”

Entrustet is part of a new and growing market of companies offering ways for people to manage these assets. Right now, dealing with your online life after death can be difficult, painful, or just plain spooky for your loved ones.

“In all this area of internet law is very underdeveloped,” said Nathan Dosch, an attorney focused on estate planning, tax and business law at Neider & Boucher, S.C. in Madison. “This is mostly due to one important aspect of things like email accounts, Facebook, etc. That aspect is that the user does not have a property rights in the account itself. Instead they have a license to access/use the account.”

Capital Entrepreneurs member company Entrustet was featured on BBC and Wired after cofounder Nathan Lustig attended the first annual Digital Death Day at the Computer History Museum in Mountain View California.  From the BBC article:

“There’s no standard practice across the industry yet. There are no norms for how digital assets are passed on to heirs,” says Kaliya Hamlin, another of Digital Death Day’s organisers.

And it could be the case that digital assets could have real-money value. Domain names can be sold for large sums of money and even Twitter accounts can be monetised with “sponsored tweets”.

‘Real money transactions’

Jesse Davis, co-founder of Entrustet, a company allowing the creation of a will for digital assets says: “There are two types of value stored in your online accounts, economic and sentimental… both types of assets need to be considered carefully in building a proper digital estate plan.”

Despite investing a huge amount of time into characters, players don’t have any ownership rights to [them] Tamer Asfahani Incgamers.com

Indeed, some massive multiplayer online games (MMOGs) rely on real money transactions and with between 15 and 20 million users paying to play the games, it can be very lucrative.

From the Wired article:

On 20 May 2010 an event known as “Digital Death Day” brought together the businesses of social networking, data management and death care.

One of its organisers, Jennifer Holmes, says: “We have reached a critical mass of personal data online.” ’Critical mass’ oughta mean that we violently explode, but maybe the mortality rate of Internet users will be a little slower.”

She is referring to the billions of pages held by Facebook and other social networking sites, as well as blogs, online gaming sites… basically anything into which we put data… data which, in most cases, remains after we die.