Tag: Obituaries

So, You Want to Get in Touch with Echovita? Good Luck (But Please Don’t Phone Me)

Image Credit: Le Journal de Montréal

I first wrote about obituary piracy back in 2019, and then more recently (here and here) about the online obituary company, Echovita which, to be clear, does not engage in copyright infringement. This is because it manages to stay just within the law by taking information from obituaries on funeral home websites and posting rewrites based on the basic, non-copyrightable facts regarding the deceased, even though the family or funeral home has not granted permission for them to do so. While full obituaries describing a person’s life can be protected by copyright law, basic facts are not protectable. Echovita takes full advantage of this, frequently to the anguish of bereaved family members and the annoyance of funeral homes. Not only does Echovita post the rewritten obituaries without seeking permission from either the family or the funeral home (which is legal), they also not infrequently get basic facts wrong. This is likely explained by use of AI in reviewing and rewriting thousands of obituaries a day. Predeceased relatives have been recorded as mourning the deceased. Pets have been identified as friends of the departed. And since Echovita’s business model is to monetize the obituaries by selling memorial items such as flowers, tree plantings etc. on their obituary site, they cut into a revenue source of the funeral homes who host the “authorized” obituaries. To date, no jurisdiction has enacted any law prohibiting the practice of monetizing obituaries without the consent of the family. Whether there should be such a law is another matter.

On its website (FAQ), Echovita explains how an incorrect obituary can be removed or edited. However, the bereaved family needs to initiate the remedy by completing an online form. Apart from this contact sheet on its website, there appears to be no other way to get in direct contact with Echovita. No doubt they prefer it that way. It’s easier to filter complaints, and you don’t have to deal with irate family members phoning to complain about mistakes in an unauthorized obituary of a loved one. I am not sure what Echovita’s error rate is. It may be quite small but given that it scrapes obituaries from websites all over North America, even a small error rate could be significant in absolute terms. And if it is the obituary of your loved one that has been mangled, it is very significant, and hurtful. All I know is that since I wrote my most recent blog posting on Echovita in July, I have started to receive phone calls from distressed family members from various parts of the US. Since I don’t answer phone calls that I don’t recognize, they usually leave a voice message, often very irate and threatening legal action if a particular obituary is not taken down forthwith.

At first, I was puzzled as to why I was getting these calls, but I attribute it to AI. People who feel victimized by Echovita want to take action quickly and to vent. This is understandable. Simply filling out a request on a website to have an unauthorized obituary corrected or removed (three days is the apparent standard) is not as satisfying as speaking to someone right now. You won’t find Echovita’s phone number anywhere but if you do a deep enough internet search on the company, my previous blog postings on Echovita will come up and, I surmise, AI will produce my phone number in response to a request for a “phone number associated with Echovita”. When I get called like this, I phone back, express my condolences and explain that unfortunately they are shooting the messenger. The first question is always, “how can I get in direct touch with Echovita?”. Here is what I know.

The company is run by someone called Pascal (aka Paco) Leclerc. I know this from various press articles, such as this one a few years ago in Wired and more recently in the Toronto Star. I also know this because after my most recent blog posting on Echovita, (Echovita is Still Going Strong: The Sleazy (but Apparently Legal) Business of Monetizing Obituaries Without Consent) I received an email apparently from him as CEO of Echovita requesting removal of my “inaccurate and misleading” blog post. It went on to say that; “Your article contains statements and implications that are factually inaccurate, misleading, and potentially damaging to our reputation. Echovita operates fully within the law, follows industry norms, and provides a free, valuable service to families by making obituaries more accessible and offering optional remembrance tools.”

This was (part of) my response;

“I publish a blog discussing copyright issues, often using current legal cases or media coverage to illustrate the topics under discussion, presenting my opinions on issues such as copyright piracy, use of copyrighted content by AI development companies and other copyright-related issues. My viewpoint is pro-creator and pro-copyright, as stated on the blog.

One topic on which I have written concerns piracy of obituaries, given that an obituary is usually a creative work that can be protected under copyright. In the case of Echovita, I have commented that Echovita’s business model of scraping obituary websites, extracting the basic unprotected facts concerning the death, and then republishing the basic information, is legal and avoids copyright infringement in contrast to the practices of another entity, Afterlife, that was found to have engaged in “obituary piracy”. I also noted that Echovita’s business practices are controversial and have upset many family members of the departed because the republished obituaries (more correctly, death notices), have been published without the consent or even in many cases the knowledge of those who may have originally published the obituary in a newspaper or on a mortuary website.

Because of the lack of consent or contact with the family, mistakes have been made in the death notices published by Echovita. While Echovita undertakes to correct any such mistakes, it is incumbent on the family to request the correction. I contrasted Echovita’s business with Legacy.com, which operates a similar website but does so on the basis of obituary content licensed from newspapers and with the consent of those placing the obituaries. Please indicate which parts of the above summary, or indeed information that I included in the blog post are inaccurate or misleading. I strive for accuracy and would be happy to correct any such misinformation on the blog.”

That was a couple of months ago. I have not heard back.

Echovita’s position is that it is providing a “service” to families (albeit one that they did not, in most instances, request). Its stated “mission” is to “make public information more easily accessible, free of charge”. While it has had plenty of complaints directed at it, one of Echovita’s responses is to encourage voluntary use of its site. For example, it advertises that users can add photos, personalize a text or authorize the original obituary for publication.

All for free! (whether you want it or not).

Here is an excerpt from one of its blurbs;

“Grief is universal and so is the need to remember. By centralizing obituaries online and making them easy to find and share, Echovita fills a critical gap between funeral homes, grieving communities, and the permanence of the internet. No family should lose a tribute because a newspaper shut down or because a paid notice couldn’t be afforded.”

Touching, n’est-ce pas? The problem is not the voluntary option. The problem (the moral problem, not the legal one) is the unauthorized republication and monetization of death notices of deceased family members without the consent, or in many cases, even knowledge of family members, compounded by making errors in republication. This business model is another offshoot of the internet where it costs very little to collect and digitally republish information, potentially reaching a market of millions to provide third party services on the platform. And it’s all perfectly legal.

But what if someone wants to actually talk to a real person at Echovita, say Paco Leclerc or one of his employees, to express some concerns?  Well, good luck to that.

According to the website Zoominfo.com, Echovita is headquartered in Quebec City, Canada, at 8967 1ère Ave, Quebec, Quebec, G1G 4C5, Canada. If you go to that address on Google Street View, a building with name Funerago on it appears. Funerago.com has a website (and a phone number). It is an online platform offering basic cremation services and is associated with another entity called Funera which provides somewhat more expensive cremation services. Funera is located at the same addresss. Testimonials on Funera’s site thank Paco Leclerc for his help and understanding. The Wired article back in 2021 that I referenced above mentions that Leclerc intended to invest in a new business called Funerago so there is clearly some connection between Funerago and Echovita, including a common business address. So, of course I called Funerago and asked to speak to someone, anyone, about Echovita. All the person who answered would say was that someone would call me back. I left my phone number.

If they call, I will have a contact number for Echovita, one that I would be happy to share. But it’s been a couple of weeks and I am still waiting. The silence is deafening. I don’t expect to be called anytime soon.

© Hugh Stephens, 2025. All Rights Reserved.

Echovita is Still Going Strong: The Sleazy (but Apparently Legal) Business of Monetizing Obituaries Without Consent

A close-up of delicate white flowers in bloom, alongside softly glowing white candles, creating a tranquil and reflective atmosphere.

Image: Shutterstock

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.

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

Image: Shutterstock.com

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.

Distasteful Yes, But Not Copyright Infringement: Publishing “Basic Fact” Unauthorized Obituaries is Going Strong (And Often Getting it Wrong)

Image: Shutterstock.com (with AI Assist)

Tempus fugit. Time flies, as we all know. It’s hard for me to believe that it was over 5 years ago that I wrote a couple of blogs on obituary piracy;  (The Deadliest Aspects of Copyright and Obituary Piracy Punished: Has Infringement No Bounds?) Those blogs were about an outfit in Canada that styled itself Afterlife. Afterlife’s business model was to post obituaries on their site they had harvested from newspapers and funeral home websites in order to sell virtual candles, flowers and other forms of remembrance for the departed. Not surprisingly, families of those so featured objected since they had not authorized Afterlife to publish, let alone monetize, their personal tributes to their deceased family members. A class action lawsuit was launched, alleging copyright infringement since an obituary, a creative work embodying original expression, can be protected by copyright. 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. In the Afterlife case, the Federal Court of Canada awarded damages of $20 million and issued an injunction preventing Afterlife from continuing to publish.

In this case copyright infringement was the legal tool used to stop Afterlife’s activities. While the court case succeeded in getting Afterlife to stop what the judge called “obituary piracy”, those running the business simply changed tactics. They declared bankruptcy (no doubt to thwart any collection of damages) and opened a new site called Everhere. Everhere avoided copyright infringement by highlighting a death, but then linking to the obituary posted elsewhere without copying or reproducing it. Among other things, it became a specialized ad-supported obituary search engine. I lost sight of Everhere and its somewhat sleazy business model until unauthorized obituaries again hit the headlines in a recent story published by the Canadian Press.

This time the company is known as Echovita. At least some of the same people involved with Afterlife are apparently running Echovita, according to the Canadian Press report. Apart from the fact that families are upset that the passing of a loved one is being monetized by an unknown third party on its website, often to the surprise of friends and relatives who may have searched for the obituary on a search engine and not realized that the Echovita obituary is an unauthorized version, it appears that not infrequently mistakes are made. This is because in order to avoid its previous problems with copyright infringement, Echovita is doing quick rewrites of material it has skimmed from the internet. No doubt it is paying various freelancers by the piece to produce obituaries from so-called “tombstone data” (the basic facts of a person’s life), and the mass production of large numbers of these each day naturally leads to mistakes being made. The author of the Echovita obit doesn’t know the deceased from Adam. They don’t know if he or she had two or ten grandchildren, or none and, to be blunt, they don’t care. The obituary is just another commodity they are producing. They could just as easily be writing about soap flakes or breakfast cereal. In defending itself against accusations that it made mistakes in some obituaries, Echovita is reported as saying it regrets that it made a “human error” when taking the “basic facts” from an obituary posted on the internet, while noting that it was legal to do so.

Going to the Echovita site is instructive. Obituaries are not restricted to Canada. People using the website have the option of purchasing virtual candles that will “burn” for various periods from a week to a year, depending on payment and preference. The virtual candle will “burn” on the site of the barebones obit published by Echovita. You can also plant a tree or order flowers in remembrance. And there are ads for various things, such as Ancestry.com. It makes my skin crawl.

From a legal perspective (at least with regard to copyright infringement), Echovita’s claim that what they are doing is legal appears to be correct.  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. While the New York Times can copyright its reporting of, say, the war in Gaza, anyone can report on what is happening in Gaza. No news outlet has a monopoly on the news although they can protect their expression of the news, an issue I examined in this blog a couple of years ago, (Do News Publishers “Own” the News? (And Should They be Compensated when Others use News Content they Publish?). Distasteful as it seems, there is no law that I am aware of that stops Echovita or anyone else from taking basic data (facts) from a published obituary (name, date of death, place of service, etc) and rewriting and publishing it. Using it for commercial purposes might be something else. I wonder if the terms of service of a funeral home website might limit the lifting and reusing of this information for commercial purposes, but I will leave that idea for the lawyers to ponder.

According to the Canadian Press article, the president of the Funeral Services Association of Canada is lobbying the federal government to strengthen privacy legislation to deal with the republication of obituary details, but has had little response. I am no expert on privacy legislation, but I know it is a minefield where the need for personal privacy must be balanced against freedom of expression. In the meantime, the best solution the Funeral Association can offer is to contact sites like Echovita and ask that an unauthorized obituary be taken down, although they would have no incentive or legal obligation to comply.

Dealing with obituary piracy, whether officially copyright infringing or not, is a difficult issue. Undertaking reform will not be simple. Pardon the pun.

© Hugh Stephens, 2024. All Rights Reserved.