The Higher Regional Court (OLG) of Oldenburg has ruled that heirs can have unrestricted access to a deceased person’s Instagram account, including the right to actively use it. Until now, Meta, the company behind Instagram, placed the accounts of deceased users in so-called memorialized status. In this mode, the account remains visible, but users can no longer log in or post content.<\/p>\n\n
The case decided by the Higher Regional Court involved the wife and sole heir of Alphonso Williams, the DSDS winner who died in 2017. After Meta learned of his death in 2022, his Instagram account was memorialized, even though his wife had continued to use it. She then attempted to regain access and filed a lawsuit against Meta, represented by the law firm White & Case LLP. While the Oldenburg Regional Court initially granted her only read-only access, the Higher Regional Court went further, granting her unrestricted access, including the ability to actively post content.<\/p>\n\n
According to lawyer Larissa Rus from the Media law firm in Frankfurt, who represented the heir, the ruling is of great importance, as there has been no supreme court decision to date that also clarified the active access of heirs.<\/p>\n\n
The Higher Regional Court justified its decision by stating that the heir steps into the contractual relationship between Meta and the deceased. It cited a landmark ruling by the Federal Court of Justice from 2018, which confirmed the inheritability of the right to access a social media account. This contractual relationship encompasses both passive reading rights and active usage rights.<\/p>\n\n
” Meta argued that the company’s services were personal and that active use by the heirs had to be excluded. The Higher Regional Court disagreed. Meta’s services were purely technical in nature\u2014for example, providing a platform and publishing content. Since these services could be provided unchanged to heirs as well, the court saw no reason to deny active access,<\/em> ” explains lawyer Istv\u00e1n Cocron.<\/p>\n\n The Oldenburg Regional Court justified its access restriction with the Federal Court of Justice’s case law on current account agreements, according to which the relationship of trust between bank and customer plays a role. The Higher Regional Court rejected this comparison: no comparable relationship of trust exists between Meta and the holder of an Instagram account. Unlike with a bank, the user neither entrusts assets to Meta, nor is the contractual relationship characterized by special trust.<\/p>\n\n The Higher Regional Court sees no legal obstacles preventing active use by the heirs and considers the contractual relationship between Meta and the deceased to be comparable to other contractual relationships in which obligations and rights are transferred to the heirs. “The ruling could therefore have far-reaching consequences for the handling of digital estates,”<\/em> says attorney Cocron.<\/p>\n\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The Higher Regional Court (OLG) of Oldenburg has ruled that heirs can have unrestricted access to a deceased person’s Instagram account, including the right to actively use it. Until now, Meta, the company behind Instagram, placed the accounts of deceased users in so-called memorialized status. In this mode, the account remains visible, but users can […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"template":"","news-kategorie":[30],"class_list":["post-3401","news","type-news","status-publish","hentry","news-kategorie-erbrecht"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ra-cocron.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news\/3401","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ra-cocron.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ra-cocron.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/news"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ra-cocron.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3401"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"news-kategorie","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ra-cocron.de\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/news-kategorie?post=3401"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}Not transferable to current accounts<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n
Significance of the ruling<\/strong><\/h2>\n\n