Monday, August 13, 2012

All that glitters

All that glitters by Damian Gadal
All that glitters, a photo by Damian Gadal on Flickr.
We're in the era of cloud content, there's no question about that.  And yet, it seems that there are and will be many questions to answer.  Such as what happens to that digital content once a person passes away?

Cloud content, the version we're being sold now, has been around for less than a decade.  Prior to this, most music content was stored on hard drives and iPods, and in the case of movies much of that was still on DVD, and books were still printed on paper.

This has started to change drastically with the advent of the iPad, Kindle, Kindle Fire, Roku, Apple TV, an expanded iTunes, and Amazon Instant Video store.

You can now buy and store your content in the cloud and access it almost anywhere.  This is a great convenience, and sure makes for a lot less clutter and reduces storage issues.

But just like physical media in the days before the cloud, digital media accumulates, and rather quickly.

I'm sure it won't be uncommon to have thousands of dollars worth of digital media stored on servers on person's personal accounts that our family and friends may not know about, but might want none the less,

So again, what happens to it when we die?

It's been bought and paid for... does it just go away?  Poof?

At this point I'm just curious, but I'm sure it's an issue that will need to be addressed and probably very soon.

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