
A couple of months ago I put up a blog posting about copyright and its intersection with that most universal of human conditions, our finite time on this earth. OK, let’s call it by its real name, death, something that we all have to deal with sooner or later. In that blog, after discussing the issue of how copyright protection extends for a specified period of time after the passing of the author, a term of protection generating economic benefit for the author’s estate which can vary in length by country, I referred to the case of a website that was operating in Canada called Afterlife. If you can believe it, the operators of this site were running a business based on the unauthorized postings of obituaries that they harvested from newspapers and the websites of funeral homes. The business model consisted of selling virtual candles and other forms of remembrance for the departed, all without any authorization from the family of the deceased. Since most obituaries are creations (personal descriptions of a person’s life), they enjoy the protection of copyright, so Afterlife’s business model was not only tasteless and an invasion of privacy but also a violation of copyright law. Now the law has caught up with the operators of the site. Continue reading “Obituary Piracy Punished: Has Infringement No Bounds?”