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especially when we are trying to assess the impact it has on your assets and your life. We can no longer expect people to be confined to computers and hard disks at their home and office. Looking for assets, obligations and income streams can encompass services through which a person can:

Establish their own web site and data archive apple.com

Establish their own blog apple.com

Maintain their own invitation-only chat rooms click here for groove

Maintain sales contracts or assets in a form which can be traded electronically with a range of businesses such as:

Ebay: online auction ebay

iTunes: service by Apple enables legal downloading of music, movies and TV shows apple.com

WINKsite: mobile community designed for personal expression and social networking winksite

As the boundaries between phone, camera, MP3 player and web computing begin disappearing, establishing what digital data is valuable to you and where it is located is becoming difficult. Even when we THINK we know which devices you are interested in and where they are located, there still remains the need for representatives to settle the contractual and network security information. Estate planning should include providing your estate solicitor and representatives with information about Internet Service Provider (ISP) accounts and associated services to which you subscribe. This may assist your representatives to manage issues such as:

Transferring a website and associated account in the event of your death.

Enabling your representatives to be recognised as the controllers of ISP accounts and their associated data.

ascertaining what property or responsibility is associated with an online subscription or service entry on a credit card or banking system.

The best advice we can give anybody contemplating estate planning and for their representatives in managing their estate is top be AWARE. There is no substitute for full information. These issues might particularly apply to people who are artistic (musicians, authors, artists); IT developers (software and application developers, hardware designers); conducting or managing any part of their business online or by electronic means. Important information includes:

Passwords

Email and web accounts

Data storage arrangements

Collecting Society agreements

Content commercialisation contract

Content under development (not yet complete but saleable)

Just turning off a person’s computer in the event of their death or disability may lead to loss of valuable content (both financially and sentimentally). For more information on this topic, look forward to the July issue of the Eagle Eye. If you can’t wait that long, our Estate Planning team is available to discuss how these increasingly important issues can be managed to ensure the protection of your valuable assets.