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ScienceDaily (Sep. 26, 2012) Federal law ought to play a stronger role in regulating social networking sites by allowing users to determine what happens to their "digital afterlives," says a recently published paper by a University of Illinois expert in intellectual property law.

Allowing social networking sites to set their own policies regarding the content associated with the accounts of deceased users does not adequately protect individual and collective interests, especially with people spending an increasing part of their lives online using social networking sites, says Jason Mazzone, a professor of law.

"Virtually no law regulates what happens to a person's online existence after his or her death," he said. "This is true even though individuals have privacy and copyright interests in materials they post to social networking sites."

Mazzone says in the absence of legal regulation, social networking sites are unlikely to adopt user-friendly policies for the disposition of copyright materials from the accounts of the deceased.

"The current situation is that there's very little law involved," said Mazzone, the Lynn H. Murray Faculty Scholar at Illinois. "Social networking sites determine on their own what, if anything, to do with a deceased user's account and the materials the user posted to the site. And their policies are not likely to reflect the collective interests that exist with respect to copyright law. It's a little bit like letting the bank decide what to do with your money after you die."

According to the paper, a federal statute could impose some requirements upon social networking sites to give users a degree of control over what happens to their accounts.

"You only want the federal government involved if there's some failure on the part of the states," Mazzone said. "But it would be very difficult for any particular state to set up a legal regime that would adequately regulate Facebook, which not only operates all across the U.S. but also all over the world. Some states have enacted legislation in an effort to protect their own citizens, but it's not at all clear how it would affect Facebook as a whole.

"In order for this type of law to be effective, we have to turn to the federal government."

There are also broader societal interests for preserving content for historical purposes, said Mazzone, the author of "Copyfraud and Other Abuses of Intellectual Property Law," published by Stanford University Press in 2011.

"It's becoming increasingly common for people to have digital assets, and some of them do actually have value," he said. "Not only are such sites repositories of intellectual property, they also are important to family members and friends. Historians of the future will likely depend upon digital archives to reconstruct the past, which creates a real problem, particularly in an age when we don't leave diaries, and, increasingly, people don't write books."

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Federal law needed to safeguard 'digital afterlives', expert argues