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After the recent death of a dear friend, I was watching for the publication of his obituary to mark the final chapter. His distinguished professional and post-professional career certainly merited it, and a couple of weeks after his passing I was pleased to spot a full column in the printed edition of Globe and Mail, the paper that could arguably be called English Canada’s journal of record. An obituary in the Globe is a fitting tribute to anyone. To my surprise, when I went to look at the online version, first logging into my digital subscription to the Globe, I was taken to another website, Legacy.com. I didn’t ask to be taken there, it just happened.
The obituary was there, verbatim as printed in the Globe, with the same information and photo, but with some additional options. I could purchase a memorial tree, in fact I could purchase a whole grove of 100 memorial trees. I could order various memorial floral offerings, which it appears are actually delivered by an outfit called Blooms Today. I could also buy a sympathy card and have it shipped to me. There may be other things that I could also buy as there is a handy 1-888 number, but I didn’t pursue it. All this is linked back to the Globe and Mail’s listings of obituaries via a button on Legacy’s home page but even though you appear to be visiting the Globe site, there is a header that says, “You are now on Legacy.com. Your site use is governed by their Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policy. Any purchases are with Legacy.com. Learn More”. “Learn More” takes you to Legacy’s Terms and Conditions and Privacy Policies.
So, just who is Legacy.com? Legacy is a Chicago based company that has been around for about a quarter of a century. It dominates the online obituary business and has numerous press affiliates. Customers can list their obit on Legacy, which can then help them to have it published in any of its 2600 affiliate publications in the US, driving business to papers all over the country. In Canada, Legacy has affiliations with almost 90 publications (it is hard to keep the record accurate because they keep going out of business!) ranging from major dailies like the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star to tiny weeklies in small communities. PostMedia, which operates dailies in most major Canadian cities is not an affiliate. This reference service helps sustain the newspaper business, since printing obituaries is one of the few forms of “advertising” where the printed media still plays a reasonably prominent role. Heaven knows, the industry needs all the help it can get to attract sources of revenue.
Legacy apparently does not charge newspapers for its referral service but gets a cut of the amount paid for printing the obituary. If the obituary has initially been placed in the newspaper, and subsequently posted on Legacy.com, the website gets the obituary content without charge but kicks back to the paper of record a percentage of the amount it generates from merchandise it “upsells” to those who visit the site. The bereaved family has paid for the obituary but it becomes fodder for peddling memorial products and services. However, this is a good deal for both parties, the website and the newspaper. Legacy gets more content against which it can sell the memorial paraphernalia listed on its website, while the newspaper gets some revenue from the merchandise sales and doesn’t have to pay to maintain the website or to post its obituaries online. And I guess even the bereaved family is not all that fussed because the obituary gets wider circulation, although they have paid extra for this additional exposure.
This is all laid out in the “Affiliate Partnership Overview” at sales.legacy.com. This is how the revenue model works;
“Newspaper increases price of death notice for enhanced online product.
Newspaper receives percentage of gross revenue from add-on product sales administered online by Legacy.com and advertising sales.
Newspaper retains all page views and owns all advertising inventory within in the header and footer on the co-branded site.”
When you pay for an obituary in the Globe or any of the other newspapers with whom Legacy.com has an affiliation agreement, you pay extra for the online listing (in the case of the Globe, the extra charge is $60, which is minor compared with the cost of printing most obituaries). As noted above, the Globe or other affiliate gets a kickback from the add-on product sales generated from friends and relatives of the deceased who visit the site.
None of this is illegal and the information about how it works is easily found on the internet. In the past I have written about dodgy obituary websites that either copy obituaries without authorization, or do quick rewrites of posted obituaries, allegedly copying only the “basic facts” of the deceased person’s life (which in their haste they sometimes get wrong) in order to avoid charges of copyright infringement. In both cases, the end game is to monetize the content, as Legacy.com is doing, but Legacy has made it legal by signing affiliate and revenue-sharing agreements with the newspapers publishing the obituaries.
Obituaries are considered copyrighted works. Even though Legacy.com offers templates to write obituaries and no doubt some are now written with the use of AI, most obituaries are thoughtfully composed pieces reflecting the deceased person’s achievements and character, sometimes self written before death or more frequently composed by a loved one. In either case, they are creative works and are protected by copyright law, although the facts, such as a deceased person’s date of birth or death, name of spouse, number of children, etc. cannot be protected. The website that was copying obituaries without authorization, known as Afterlife, was shut down and fined on the basis of copyright infringement. If a carefully written obituary is a copyrighted work, and if you wrote the obituary and thus legally hold the copyright, how is it that the Globe or other outlets can in effect resell or license your copyrighted work to Legacy.com? Simple. It is because you, the author, agreed to it.
When placing an obituary in the Globe, the person submitting it is presented with the following;
“By submitting an obituary, you agree to The Globe and Mail’s Terms and Conditions and Advertising Terms and Conditions (Print and Digital) as well as for online obituaries, Legacy.com’s Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.”
If you take the time to wade through all that you will find that in the Globe’s Advertising Terms there is a clause (paragraph 20) that says that any advertising published in the paper may, at the Globe’s discretion, be published, displayed, retained and archived by the paper and anyone authorized by the Globe (including by any form of licence), as many times as the Publisher and those authorized by Publisher so wish, including anything in print, electronic and other form. I hadn’t thought of an obituary as advertising, but insofar as it involves purchasing space in a newspaper to disseminate information, I guess that is exactly what it is. In any event, by placing an obit you are subject to the Globe’s advertising code. The wording in Para 20 that a consumer is required to accept if they want their obituary to be published clearly allows the Globe to provide your content to Legacy.com
As for Legacy, this is almost no limit as to what they can do with an obituary provided to it through one of its affiliates. By using their platform, a person submitting an obituary is granting Legacy. Com;
“a royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive right and license to use, copy, modify, display, archive, store, publish, transmit, perform, distribute, reproduce and create derivative works from all Material (provided to) Legacy.com in any form, media, software or technology of any kind now existing or developed in the future. You grant all rights described in this paragraph in consideration of your use of the Services without the need for additional compensation of any sort to you.
(Legacy.com Terms of Use 3. (c).)
Note that Legacy does not own the content, the rights holder does, but it has been granted a licence to do all of the above.
The person submitting the obituary also must certify that they are the author of the content or that the content is not protected by copyright law, or that they have express permission from the copyright owner to post the content.
All this just because you wanted to print Grandpa’s obituary in the Globe!
Can you opt out of having the obituary published on Legacy and restrict it to just the print edition? Yes, you can (at least insofar as the Globe is concerned; I don’t know about other affiliates). Additionally, the Globe informed me that if I still wanted an obituary to be online, but without the ads, they would ask Legacy to remove any third party advertising for trees, flowers, etc., from the notice. (I presume if the Globe asks, Legacy will comply). While this is helpful in ultimately putting the decision in the hands of the person placing the obituary, (the so-called “advertiser”), the default is for the obituary to be posted on Legacy.com, with ads.
To its credit, the Globe does disclose that this will happen;
“The Globe and Mail’s online obituary is powered by Legacy.com, and may include services from third party suppliers such as flowers, memorial trees and charities.”
Thus no-one can say that they didn’t know this was happening, although they may not have particularly focused on it. Perhaps they don’t object. One can also argue that Legacy provides an additional service and that no one is obliged to purchase any of the add-ons found on the website. In return for the opportunity to sell against your loved one’s obituary, Legacy provides a permanent (insofar as anything is “permanent”), searchable database of obituaries. Maybe that is the way to look at it. Death is a part of life and those who work in the “death business” perform an essential service (in some cases) or a desired service in others. So, why do I find it offensive that the Globe has monetized the memory of my friend?
Maybe I am just old fashioned but it seems to me there are certain conventions surrounding the end of life business, although these are probably changing. Dreary funerals are replaced by more joyous celebrations of life. Yet it still seems somehow inappropriate to openly market memorial products off the back of an obituary. I note that the Globe’s obituary page in its printed edition contains no ads, and it’s not as if there is not space. There is space for ads but the only ones that appear are fillers promoting the Globe’s own obituary services (“Precious memories”, “In your thoughts”, etc). At the end of the day, remember that the obituary you have written for someone is your creative, copyrighted work, and you have every right to determine how it is used. If you want it up on the web “in perpetuity” be prepared for the compromise of having it supported through e-commerce.
As much as I am grumbling, the important thing is that the obituary of my friend, a fitting tribute, was published and seen. And maybe a few memorial trees even got planted, which I guess is not a bad thing.
© Hugh Stephens 2025. All Rights Reserved.
Wow! Quite a story Hugh. Online sites seldom fail to capitalize on available copy, and in this instance, with the Globe’s agreement.
A VRMNC former reporter for a major Canadian newspaper brought to my attention the astronomical fees association with printed and online obits. When my mother-in-law died last fall, I unfortunately confirmed that his comment was not inflated to make a better story. Here obituary, placed by the funeral home, was more than $4,000. It was of little consolation that the photo was in colour.
Good article!
Again, a very thoughtful, if somewhat disturbing, article about the ubiquitous copyright and AI intrusions into every aspect of our life and death.
The traditional Scottish ‘Wake’ was never dreary. It was a party, with great conviviality. At least the ones I attended. The ‘Celebration of Life’ carries vestiges of the Wake, but perhaps without the deep history. Thank you for your wonderfully informed observations.