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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 (the exchange rate on Friday: $1 bought 259 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 e-mail messages.

The value of virtual goods is expected to surpass $1 billion in the United States 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 recognize 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.

Access was the problem that the family of Lance Cpl. Justin Ellsworth had after he was killed in Falluja, Iraq, in late 2004. Based on the terms of service he had agreed to, Yahoo refused to give his family Ellsworth’s password or access to his correspondence.

A court ordered Yahoo to hand over the documents in 2005, which it did, but no definitive ruling on the status of such digital assets was made.

Until now, companies have responded in a case-by-case manner, trying to protect themselves from liability, but making changes at the request of users.

One way to resolve the question of access is for a site to require a user to name a digital executor to receive a person’s latest passwords after death.



The New York Times