Heading towards a change in Israeli legislation?

Following the meeting in ILITA (Israeli Law, Information and Technology Authority in the Ministry of Justice); I had a meeting at the Ministry of Justice in early April 2013 with the following representatives: the Head of litigation and advisory department, attorney Erez Kaminitz, Director of Intellectual Property Law; attorney Howard Poliner ; attorney Ariel Zvi and interns Yishai Pearlman and Moshe Frucht; and attorney Nir Gerson, who is Head of Technology at ILITA.

I introduced the following topics: digital legacy, digital estate planning, digital and virtual assets and property; and have briefly reviewed the situation in these fields, both generally and legally:

• A U.S. newscast of March 2013: Law Lags in Defining Posthumous Protocol for Online Accounts.
• An article of August 2012 in Market Watch: "Most digital content exists in a legal black hole".
• U.S. Status of legislation: Five states have enacted laws in this subject. Additional state has recently approved a new bill. 

I presented the current situation in Israel: No network provider publishes its policy in case of death of the user; some have questionable policies; another company has yet to answer: 
We focused on Israeli inheritance laws, and deconstructed basic concepts: will the definitions used worldwide will also apply here? The word inheritance bears legal meanings when using the terminology of digital inheritance, and decisions about how to treat such meanings in Israel has yet to be taken. 

This was an initial meeting, to mark the beginning of a process, but I did left the meeting feeling that such process exists, as well as people to communicate with in his regard. I met people who, recognizing the importance of this subject, appeared genuinely interested in learning more; and I do hope that as a result, Israeli legislation will eventually be changed.

I will keep updating. 


Thank you Noa Ron for translating this post.