Death in an online age raises issues of ownership

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: Chris V Nicholson

Two avatars, Leto Yoshiro and Enchant Jacques, met in the virtual world of Second Life in 2005. They married online the same year and built a house together on an island. In real life, Leto was a film producer from Michigan, Enchant an accountant from England. In 2008, Leto died of liver failure while awaiting a transplant.

About six months later, the island where the avatars had lived, along with everything on it, was erased under the terms of service that Leto had signed with Linden Lab, the company that created the platform for Second Life. It had been bought in his name in Linden dollars, and Enchant decided she could not pay the fees to maintain it. All that remains are a few objects of which she had copies. “We had an island we shared,” Enchant said during an interview. For privacy reasons, she asked that neither her real name nor Leto’s be published.

Almost everybody online will someday face a similar situation after a loved one dies, whether it is deciding what to do with a Facebook profile or passing on archived email messages.

The value of virtual goods is expected to surpass $1 billion in the US this year, according to a recent report by analysts at Inside Virtual Goods. The global market is thought to be five or six times greater than that. Offline, no deed and title company sends a crew to tear down a home. But online, under the agreements that users accept, that can be the default setting.

“When you have a real, tangible sword or gold coin, you can have an exclusive right to that object, and the law can recognise that,” said Greg Lastowka, a law professor at Rutgers University in New Jersey who is writing a book on property rights and virtual goods. “But when you have the mediation of the network software and the owner of the virtual environment, they have an interest as well. They’re caught in the middle.”

MySpace, YouTube and other social networking sites promote a sense of ownership about content that users create. But control of digital assets is often disputed.