Family heirlooms, a favourite lamp or maybe a priceless painting are the kind of assets that people leave to their loved ones in their wills, but a trend has developed recently of people including internet passwords in their estate planning.
Research by the internet hosting company Rackspace found that British people have amassed a £2.3 billion collection of videos, music, books and photos stored online.
Rather than lose all these digital assets, 31% of 2,000 UK adults surveyed claimed that they would pass on their digital legacy to their family members when they died.
This is hardly surprising when a quarter of those people owned more than £200 worth of music and films stored in the 'cloud'.
Fabio Torlini, the Vice President of Rackspace, said: "The cloud is becoming more and more part of our everyday work and personal life. With the large investment so many UK adults seem to be making in digital treasures, it's imperative that people consider the associated security and legacy implications.
"Businesses have a great opportunity now to shape consumer understanding of cloud computing and build trust. It's important to remember that although cloud is for everyone, it's not for everything."
As well as valuable music and video files, people also store a great amount of sentimental items online such as "special photos" and emails.
Estate planning lawyers such as have started to change the way they write wills in order to accommodate digital estate planning and to bring to their clients' digital legacies to their attention.
Matthew Strain, of law firm Strain Keville, said: "With more photos, books, music and so on being stored online and in digital format, the question of what happens to these when people are gone becomes more important every day.
"People have not yet come to grips with the value of these digital possessions and the risk is that they may be lost if the owner dies, or even that their estate may be liable for ongoing subscriptions to online magazines or newspapers, for instance.
"We have started to advise clients on the topic of digital inheritance as it is something people should be thinking and doing something about as part of the provisions in their will.
"Making provisions for digital inheritance in a will or codicil is relatively straightforward."
Related links:
Read more on the story (Rackspace)
Read 'Financial reasons to make a will' (FindLaw)
Find local estate planning solicitors throughout the UK (FindLaw)
