Social media accounts, email archives, cloud storage, and messaging history are governed primarily by platform terms of service — not by inheritance law. Most platforms do not treat account credentials as inheritable property. GDPR rights (access, erasure, portability) are personal rights that cease on death — they cannot be exercised by heirs under EU law. The estate cannot demand a Facebook password under a will; it must go through the platform’s own memorialisation or legacy contact process.

Copyright in content created by the deceased — photographs, written work, music, video — survives death and passes to the estate. In the UK and EU, copyright lasts 70 years after the author’s death. In the US, life plus 70 years for works created after 1978. A deceased creator’s content library is a real property asset — it can be licenced, assigned, and monetised by the estate. The complication arises when the content is tied to a platform: the underlying IP is inheritable, but the platform account that hosts it is not.

The right to control commercial use of one’s name, image, and likeness varies dramatically by jurisdiction. In California, it survives death for 70 years and is inheritable. In the UK, there is no statutory post-mortem right of publicity. In most EU states, personality rights are treated as personal rights that do not survive death in their privacy dimension, though commercial aspects may persist under specific national laws.

Cryptocurrency, NFTs, and monetised platform accounts are property and pass under succession law. The practical challenge is access: private keys, two-factor authentication, and platform verification requirements can make these assets effectively inaccessible to heirs even where legal ownership is clear. A crypto wallet where the private key dies with the owner is lost property — legally owned by the estate but practically inaccessible. For how digital asset ownership interacts with IP structuring, see our guide on AI IP ownership.

Voice cloning using AI to recreate a deceased person’s voice for commercial purposes is the area seeing the most rapid legislative response in 2026. Tennessee’s ELVIS Act specifically targets AI voice replication and gives rights holders — including heirs — the ability to sue for statutory damages without proving actual harm. New York, Illinois, and California have similar provisions enacted or in final stages.

In the EU, voice cloning falls under both GDPR (if training data included personal recordings) and national personality rights laws. The EU AI Act’s biometric data provisions may provide an additional route for challenges where voice models are trained on recordings made without consent.

AI-generated video of a deceased person — “digital resurrection” for films or advertising — requires personality rights (to use the likeness) and in many cases copyright (if original footage is used as training data). The legal route depends on jurisdiction: California statutory personality rights; EU combination of GDPR and AI Act deepfake labelling requirements; UK passing off and trade mark where commercial goodwill exists.

Generating content “in the style of” a deceased author is legally harder to challenge. Style is not copyrightable — only specific expression is. An AI trained to write in the manner of a deceased writer without reproducing their actual text may not infringe copyright. The strongest available challenge is reputational: if AI-generated content is attributed to the deceased person by name and contains false statements, defamation law may apply in jurisdictions where post-mortem defamation is recognised. In the UK and US, defamation rights generally do not survive death.

Conversational AI systems that simulate a deceased person are a rapidly growing commercial category. The legal framework is almost entirely absent. In the EU, GDPR restrictions on processing personal data of deceased individuals provide some basis for challenge where the chatbot is trained on the deceased’s personal communications. The EU AI Act’s transparency requirements may apply. In the US, state right of publicity laws may cover chatbot simulations used commercially. As of 2026, no jurisdiction has a clear statutory prohibition on posthumous AI persona simulation without heir consent.