New laws required to deal with digital assets

Just ask Roger van Oosten. \'My father had a niche Internet business. When he died last year at 71, he left no provision for the business. I couldn\'t access his accounts or pay suppliers, and I couldn\'t shut the business down. People run their lives through Outlook, but I couldn’t access that either, so I couldn’t reach his customers to inform them that he\'d died.\' Forbes reports that technology has outpaced laws written to assure the orderly disposition of tangible assets such as real estate, antiques, cars, cash or investments following the owner\'s death. Such laws were drafted before the Internet and as a result are often murky when dealing with digital assets, say Holly Towle and Scott David, attorneys at Preston, Gates & Ellis in Seattle. \'We have ample law covering the world of goods. But we now live in an information economy where the value is information, and a whole lot of law pretends information is like a widget,\' Towle said. The widespread use of personal computers and new technologies has fundamentally changed the way we do business and therefore will affect estate planning. Full Forbes report