By Kim Da-ye
The Supreme Court is trying to establish the legal framework for the inheritance of “digital estates” that could include photos, passwords and other online records left behind by the victims of the Sewol tragedy.
The court held a meeting last Tuesday to discuss digital inheritance, and the outcome of this will be passed to the Office of Court Administration and fed into court policies.
The Research Society of International Judicial Systems inside the court was voluntarily formed by judges and chaired by a Supreme Court justice.
Digital estates are data that can be inherited, and range from personal information including passwords to protected valuable property such as professional digital photographs and traded assets within online games.
Back in 2010, the families of personnel killed when the frigate Cheonan was torpedoed, requested SK Communications to let them access the Cyworld accounts of the dead servicemen, but they were refused.
If the families of the Sewol tragedy victims make similar demands and bring lawsuits against IT service providers, the court does not have specific laws to refer to, so judges would have to interpret general civil laws independently.
A lawsuit over digital estates has yet to be pursued in Korea.
Choi Kyung-jin, a law professor at Gachon University, said last year in a report, “Digital estates can be inherited under Article 1005 of the Civil Code... but it is not easy to inherit because many different types of digital data exist, integrated into and mixed with each other.
“When inheritable data and non-inheritable, private data are mixed, it is nearly impossible to sort out inheritable ones from the massive volume of a digital estate.”
According to Yonhap, members of the research society agreed that digital inheritances should be dealt with under the Act on Promotion of Information and Communications Network Utilization and Information Protection, not the civil code.
The judges also concurred that when users sign terms and conditions with IT service providers, they should agree on how their data will be dealt with in the event of their death ― including to whom data should be left and how much of it.
Rep. Kim Jang-sil of the ruling Saenuri Party submitted a revision to the promotion of information act last May to allow users to choose different ways of bequeathing their digital estates.
The revision identified online postings including blog entries and items gained from online games as components of a digital estate.
The revision is pending at the National Assembly.
Digital inheritance is a controversial issue internationally.
In 2004, the father of a U.S. marine killed in Iraq asked Yahoo for a password to his son’s email account. Yahoo rejected the request, saying that disclosing it to a third party was against its privacy policy. The father sued Yahoo, and won, gaining access to the email account.
Since the lawsuit, large IT companies have established their own policies regarding access to the personal information of dead people.
Google, for example, provides the contents of a dead person’s email “after a careful review” to an authorized representative.
“The application to obtain email content is a lengthy process with multiple waiting periods,” says Google’s help page. The IT giant said that once a request for access is made, a deceased person’s account won’t be deleted.