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The phone call came out of the blue. It was from a distressed family member who had just suffered a close and tragic personal loss. That in itself was obviously difficult enough to deal with. What was really upsetting was the unauthorized dissemination of that heart-rending event through Echovita, (or Echovita Canada) including postings on Facebook which, to add insult to injury, included inaccurate information. I wrote about Echovita last fall (Distasteful Yes, But Not Copyright Infringement: Publishing “Basic Fact” Unauthorized Obituaries is Going Strong (And Often Getting it Wrong). The caller had seen this post and was reaching out for advice and help. Unfortunately I was not able to provide much of either because, it seems, having learned its lesson through its predecessor operation, Afterlife, which was fined $20 million for copyright infringement and promptly went out of business, Echovita (which is based in Quebec) manages to stay just within the law. Nonetheless, its business model preys on the bereaved and from a moral perspective is about as sleazy a business as one can imagine. Moreover, it frequently gets some of the facts wrong because it is probably scraping hundreds if not thousands of obituaries daily and uploading data which is not verified or checked by anything other than a bot. And then it puts the onus on the bereaved family to reach out to correct the error, which it undertakes to do–within 3 days! If you Google “Echovita” you will see that the internet is rife with complaints and negative comments about this company, including from individuals on Reddit and from legitimate funeral homes warning consumers not to do business with them. Here is but one example, drawn from Facebook;
“A website called ECHOVITA and other third-party websites incorrectly rewrite obituaries that are posted on funeral home websites and then urge people to make a donation. The family does NOT benefit from this, so please DO NOT donate money unless you are legitimately on a funeral home website. If you are searching the internet for an obituary, the name may appear on different websites. Always look for the obituary hosted by the funeral home that is coordinating the services”
In other words, avoid Echovita. However, if you have lost a loved one, it is almost impossible to avoid them since Echovita doesn’t ask anyone’s permission for what it is doing, scraping authorized obituaries, extracting the so-called “public information” from them, and then posting an obituary rewrite alongside ads for various memorial offerings (flowers, planting trees, memorial books etc,) as well as rolling ads for various services. Needless to say, funeral homes don’t like these “freeriders” because what they are doing upsets their clients and might even be cutting into their own revenue for follow up services. As a result the Bereavement Authority of Ontario, a funeral industry regulatory body, has called out Echovita in a “Consumer Alert” published earlier this year. While it gets lots of negative publicity and media “exposes”, like this one recently on CTV, this doesn’t deter Echovita’s owners because they are basically chasing quantity over quantity. If they harvest enough obituaries and flood the internet with them, there will be enough people who believe they are dealing with the genuine obituary and will use the Echovita platform to order flowers and other services thorough third party suppliers (like Blooms Today—which itself offers very questionable service if you believe online reviews) allowing Echovita to turn a comfortable profit. However, maybe if enough people boycotted them they might go away? One can always hope.
Given the ingenuity that people display when trying to extract revenue from the internet through Youtube, it is not surprising that a Youtube version of obituary freeriding also exists. As reported in Wired, there is a fairly recent phenomenon on Youtube of videos featuring men reading obituaries using information harvested from funeral home websites, sometimes using voiceovers of “funereal” images like candles, sometimes just reading deadpan. On occasion these low-quality videos promote direct sale of products but generally the object is to attract enough aggregate views to qualify for advertisement revenue sharing from Youtube. It’s morbid filler for the internet. What next?
Just as with Echovita’s business model, these videos avoid copyright infringement by extracting basic information (dates of birth and death, location of death etc) without using the full obituary or any visuals. As I explained in earlier blog posts, an obituary is often a creative work embodying original expression and is thus protected by copyright laws. It is the story of a person’s life, often written by a close relative or in some cases in advance by the deceased person themself. However, basic facts and ideas cannot be protected, only the expression of an idea based on those facts or ideas. The same is as true for obituaries as it is with news, and this is where the obituary harvesters enter the picture, picking up the unprotectable basic facts.
What can be done about it? Unfortunately, not a great deal except to contact Echovita to request that an unauthorized obituary be either taken down or corrected. But be careful in doing so because if, in the process of dealing with Echovita, you create an account you are agreeing to their Terms of Service which gives them rights to use your data. You can email them without creating an account but at least one Reddit listing stated that in order to approve the takedown request, you have to click on an Echovita link which then gives Echovita access to your data. Whether this is true or not, I can’t say because fortunately I have not been in the position of having to opt out of Echovita’s “services”.
Echovita encourages people to use their website to post authorized obituaries and also provides other information such as listings of funeral homes and a searchable database. This is all in an attempt to appear legitimate and drive traffic but their basic business model is based on unauthorized scraping of basic obituary information off other websites, including Legacy.com, another obituary-based business that I wrote about recently (Obituaries and Copyright: If You Publish an Obituary in the Globe and Mail (and many other papers), Be Prepared for Legacy.com and its Upsell Business Model). While Legacy.com also profits from sales of memorial items associated with obituaries of individuals, at least it is based on consent as it draws its content from obituary listings in newspapers where those placing and paying for the printed obits acknowledge and accept that the paid-for newspaper listing will be put up on the internet and given a wider reach through Legacy.com. Often, they pay extra for the Legacy.com listing. In other words, it is an “opt-in” service, unlike Echovita where people not wanting their services are required to “opt-out”.
The solution to this scourge must surely reside in privacy rather than copyright law, or perhaps in some kind of consumer protection legislation. I hope so. But for now it seems that entities like Echovita have been able to find a sweet spot that enables them to continue to take advantage of a very personal and private part of life. It should be possible to respectfully and lovingly bid adieu to departed friends and family with dignity without crass commercialization. The last thing a bereaved family needs is having to deal with unwanted and inaccurate memorializations of their loved one by online businesses that see someone’s life as just another opportunity to generate a quick buck. Very sad.
© Hugh Stephens, 2025.
