Your Art When You Die

What happens to it? I want people to ask themselves this question and then find out what the law says and see if it's agreeable to them.

This may sound morbid but after my mother passed away last year I had to deal with a lot of issues that I never wanted to think about. I was lucky in that in the aftermath of the funeral and subsequent division of my mother (and father's) belongings -all without the interference of an executer/trix- we are still on good terms with one another.

I haven't written a will but I did look into the matter and found out where all my worldly goods would default to should I die without one and I actually fall into (a probably slim) catagory of people who would be content with the way the law looks at it. (I am married, have no children, and no nasty relatives and the laws of inheritence are for B.C., Canada).

Should I ever have children I would still be content with how the law looks at rights of inheritence- only should something go radically wrong would I be worried about not having a will.

This leads into how I got to thinking about my digital 'goods' as opposed to worldly ones. I realized that I have art and photos hosted at quite a few places on the internet and I don't really know what the policy is on accounts that (literally) go dead. I imagine that a place like Deviant Art would eventually figure out that the users account should be terminated due to lack of activity but what would happen to the digital files that I uploaded?
The same for any other place I have art/photos- would those sites do the correct thing and delete the full resolution files that are sitting on their servers?

Rather than wonder about it I talked to my husband about the matter and consequently we are both in the process of getting together all our websites, forums, blogs etc that we are part of along with the passwords/logins and are comitting this information to paper so should whoever of us goes first doesn't leave a huge chore for the other. I would be able to log into his sites and he into mine and what we would do from that point on would be our own business. I just didn't want to leave it up to fate...I'm certainly not famous and neither is my husband (well, actually he is in another field but I digress) but death has a way of putting a spotlight on a person in a way that would never have happened in life- and as an artist with quite a body of work out there who knows what could happen to my imagery and consequently my name? In any case, I want the most possible amount of control of those assests going to the person of my choosing which is what this article is all about.

Sometimes people simply dissappear from web sites or forums and never show up again and there was no indication of a desire to leave- several times I've been left wondering just what happened to these people- with no way of finding out the actual truth.
It's something to think about.