An interesting story from Quentin Fottrell at MarketWatch, where he discovers that you really can’t pass along all your digital books, movies, and music when you die. This seems pretty logical with iTunes, since the “ownership” is tied to *your* email address, but it also poses a lot of problems.

For instance, in my home (as I am sure is common in many homes), only one person has a huge music collection (me) and therefore should I pass before the others in my family — what are they to do? Buy all the music again? Keep using my login forever?

That ties into something else I have long been thinking about: what happens to blogs, like this one, when the proprietor dies? I wish there were someway to cheaply preserve the content and links to the content long-term. There’s no easy solution to the problem, but it is a going to be a massive problem — all of a sudden links are going to break because sites (and all the content for the sites) just vanish.