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Your business has IP worth protecting. Your brand deal contract may be signing it away. Your AI tools may not be as confidential as you think. I'm Julie King, a patent, IP, & business attorney with 25+ years of experience, and I make intellectual property and business law actually interesting—with a rock-and-horror twist. Patents, trademarks, copyright, trade secrets, brand deals, and business law for small business owners and creators. No jargon. No condescension. Just the stuff you actually need to know. Avoid the legal horrors and keep rocking your IP. 💀🎸
Contact info at kingpatentlaw.
IP Succession Planning Part 2
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[00:00:00] Imagine something really scary with me for a minute. You're in a car accident. You're not dead. Let's not go there yet. You're gonna be okay, but you're there for three weeks, and then you're in recovery for another month after that. You're not able to work. You're not able to get on your phone. You're barely coherent for the first two weeks.
Now, who's managing your online business? Who's responding to the customers who ordered from your Shopify store? Who's handling the messages piling up in your Etsy shop? Who's making sure your domain name doesn't expire because the credit card on file got flagged while you were in ICU? Who's logging into your email platform to pause the automated sequences that are going out to your list, the ones you'd be mortified by if you knew they were still sending?
Who's managing the YouTube channel that has your full name on it and is generating ad revenue every day, you hope? Who even has access to any of this? That is the scenario I want to talk about today. Not just death, though we'll get there, but the thing that is actually statistically more likely for [00:01:00] people under sixty, becoming temporarily or permanently incapacitated and watching your digital business either stall out or spiral while you can't do anything about it.
A few weeks ago, in part one of this series, I talked about what happens to your formal IP, your trademarks, your patents, your copyrights, your trade secrets when you die or become incapacitated. If you haven't heard that one, go back and listen to that episode first or read the blog post.
It's important groundwork. Today is the part that I think is even more urgent for a lot of people because it covers something your estate attorney may never have thought about , and your IP attorney may not have either: the digital infrastructure of your business, your social media accounts, your website and domain names, your email list, your online store, your digital products, your podcast, the platforms where your revenue actually comes from.
None of that is in the traditional estate planning conversation, and the legal framework around it is genuinely strange, a mix of platform terms of service, federal computer [00:02:00] access law, state property law, and a lot of gaps where nobody has figured out the right answer yet. Let's go through it.
I'm Julie King. This is Avoid the Legal Horrors: Patent, Trademark, and Business Strategy. I'm a patent attorney, a business attorney, and a horror and rock music enthusiast. Today, I'm talking about the digital graveyard, the online businesses that go dark, the accounts that lock families out, and the domain names that expire and get snatched up, the
email lists that belong to nobody after an owner can no longer run them. You're going to learn how to avoid that and have a digital rave yard instead. Quick disclaimer, this is educational content, not legal advice, and I'm not your lawyer. For advice about your specific situation, consult with a licensed attorney.
Okay. Here is the core issue before we get into specifics. When your grandparents died, the things they owned were physical. A house, a car, bank accounts, jewelry, furniture, shares of stock represented by a paper certificate. All of that has a legal transfer process that has been [00:03:00] refined over centuries.
Courts know how to handle it. Estate attorneys know how to handle it. Title companies know how to handle it. But your online business is different in a way that the legal system has not really caught up to. Most US states have adopted some version of the Revised Uniform Fiduciary Access to Digital Assets Act, RUFADAA, , which gives fiduciaries, your trustee, your executor, your agent under a power of attorney, a legal basis to request access to your digital accounts and assets.
Because that was adopted state by state, the exact rules vary somewhat depending on jurisdiction, but those laws are genuinely useful. However, that act has a structure that most people don't know about, and understanding it changes how you think about everything else in this episode. I'm gonna cover the Uniform Law Commission's version, as that's what the state laws were based on, and it's just not practical for me to cover all the changes individual states made when they adopted the overall framework.
The act [00:04:00] establishes a three-tier priority system for determining what happens to your digital accounts. Tier one is if a platform has a built-in succession tool like Google's Inactive Account Manager, Apple's Legacy Contact, Facebook's Legacy Contact Designation, et cetera. If you set it up, those instructions generally control and may override contradictory language in your will. This is not a small thing. Setting up the platform tool correctly is one of the most legally powerful moves you can make for those accounts, and most people have never turned it on. Tier two, if there is no platform tool, the next source of authority is your estate planning documents, your will, your trust, your power of attorney.
This is where explicit digital asset language becomes important. A generic document that says, "Manage my property," may not be enough to get a platform to cooperate. Tier three, if neither of those exists, then the platform's own terms of service govern. That is how accounts end up locked, memorialized, deleted, or permanently [00:05:00] inaccessible.
The terms of service are the fallback for when you have planned nothing.
There's also a distinction in that act between catalog information like contact lists, account metadata, subscriber information, and the content of communications, email bodies, private messages. Catalog information is generally easier for a fiduciary to access. Message content is much more restricted because of the federal Stored Communications Act, even with the proper legal authority.
Which means your executor may be able to get your subscriber list, but not your client DM threads, at least not without additional documentation and possibly a fight. And here's the most important thing to understand about that act. It gives legal authority. It does not create operational access.
It does not unlock your phone. It does not get through two-factor authentication. It does not stop a platform from taking weeks to process a request while your [00:06:00] domain expires and your email sequences keep sending.
Every practical recommendation in this episode exists because the statutes give legal rights that the real world , makes very hard to exercise without preparation. Many social media accounts are governed primarily by platform contracts rather than traditional property rules.
They're governed by terms of service, contracts between you and a private company, and most of those terms say explicitly that the account is yours and cannot be transferred.
Despite that act I talked about, the platform may not do well recognizing your heirs as having any legal right to the account. It may not recognize your power of attorney as authorizing someone to operate your account on your behalf. It may not even release all your data to your family after you die without a fight, and that's the first problem.
Many of your valuable digital assets are not technically transferable under the agreements you already signed. There is a structural exception worth knowing about. [00:07:00] Many platforms that prohibit personal account transfers are substantially more cooperative when the account is held by a business entity rather than by an individual.
If your Shopify store, your email platform, or your ad accounts, your domain names are owned by, say, your LLC rather than by you personally, they're assets of the entity. A successor member or manager of the LLC has authority over the entity's property. The succession question becomes who controls the LLC, not who controls each individual account one by one.
That is a much more manageable problem, and it is one your operating agreement can address directly. If you've been running your online business out of your personal accounts and personal email, that's worth revisiting. . The second problem is access, and as I mentioned before, even if your family has every legal right to your digital assets, they may not be able to get to them.
. Because most digital business infrastructure is secured by passwords, two-factor [00:08:00] authentication, and device-specific verification, and most people have never told anyone how to get through that. Your most valuable business asset may be sitting locked behind a login screen that nobody else can access.
Like I mentioned, this area is also complicated by federal computer access laws like the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act because technically unauthorized account access can create legal problems even when the intentions are legitimate. The third problem is continuity. Even if your family can access your accounts, they may not know how to run them.
A YouTube channel is not just a login. It may be an AdSense account. It's definitely a content strategy, a community, an upload schedule, a thumbnail system. Your email list isn't just a list of accounts. It's automated sequences, subscriber segments, open rates that took years to build. Access without knowledge is only half the problem solved.
The fourth [00:09:00] problem, the one that's especially relevant to the disability scenario, is authority. If you're incapacitated but not dead, there's no death certificate to present to a platform. Your power of attorney may authorize someone to manage your financial affairs, but even where a power of attorney grants legal authority, platforms may still refuse or delay access due to their internal policies or authentication requirements.
They usually don't have a standard legal process for this person's in the hospital and her business partner or her sister or her close friend needs to run her accounts for the next eight weeks. That leaves you improvising at a moment when you can least afford to improvise. That's the landscape. Now let's go category by category to do something about that.
Actually, a quick aside first. I started drafting this episode and the list of platforms to cover just kept growing and growing and growing. I would finish a section and think, "Okay, that's probably everything," and then remember three more.
And that's not [00:10:00] me being obsessive. It's the reality of what the digital economy has built over the last two decades. Dozens of primary platforms and a seemingly infinite amount of minor platforms, many of which treat your account as personal and non-transferable, and most of which were designed as if you'll be alive and operational forever.
Like I mentioned before, your estate attorney may not be thinking about all of this, and your business and IP attorneys may not be either. The succession planning gap is real, and you're sitting in the middle of it. Okay, back to how to deal with all of this. Something I feel important to mention is that this space moves fast, and some of the platform-specific details here will go stale.
Some may be stale already by the time I post this, even though that's going to be tomorrow. Services get acquired, policies change, new tools appear. What won't change until there is meaningful new legislation or a major shift in how platforms structure account ownership and succession are the underlying problems and the framework for [00:11:00] addressing them.
Keep that premise in mind as you listen, and check current platform policies before you rely on any of this for actual planning. Think of this as more of a map than a manual and if you're looking for something a little bit more in writing to help guide you through all of these things, I do have a download on my website. I'll post the link in the comments. Now, let's start with social media, and let's start with YouTube, because it tends to be the biggest revenue generator for people with an established content presence.
YouTube is, of course, owned by Google, and your YouTube channel is tied to your Google account. Google is actually one of the better platforms when it comes to planning for incapacity or death. They have a tool called the Inactive Account Manager. It's in your Google settings, and it lets you designate what happens to your account after a period of inactivity between three and eighteen months.
You can designate specific people to receive your data or to be notified. You can choose to have the account deleted after the inactivity period. [00:12:00] You can download your YouTube data and other Google data and share it with a trusted person.
Now, most people have never heard of this, so most people haven't set it up. Go do that after this episode. If someone dies without setting it up, Google does have a process for family members to submit a request for the deceased person's account, including requesting data or requesting deletion. But it requires documentation, it takes time, and it does not automatically mean your person can take over your channel, operate it, or collect your monetization revenue while the estate is being sorted out.
For incapacity, the accident scenario I opened with, Google does not have a built-in mechanism for temporary unauthorized access. Your options are someone already has authorized access to the account, or you're scrambling Meta, which owns Instagram and Facebook and Threads, has a memorialization process.
You can designate a legacy contact, someone who can manage your memorialized Facebook profile after you [00:13:00] die. They can accept friend requests, pin a tribute post, and update your profile picture. What they can't do is log into your account, read your messages, post as you, manage your ads, access your creator monetization, or run your business.
Instagram is similar. Meta can memorialize the account or remove it. Your legacy contact has very limited powers. For a creator or business owner who runs a brand through Instagram or Facebook, this is inadequate. The business does not stop when you do. Someone needs to post.
Someone needs to respond to DMs. Someone needs to manage that ad account. None of that is covered by the memorialization process. The practical solution here is something we'll get to in the action items, but the short version is, if Instagram or Facebook is central to your business, someone else should already have admin access to a business account or page.
Not your personal account, but a structured business presence where access is shared TikTok [00:14:00] does not appear to offer a robust or well-publicized legacy contact system comparable to Google or Meta or Apple.
Your account simply exists in limbo unless someone can access it with your credentials or unless the platform eventually deactivates it for inactivity. For a creator with a significant TikTok presence and brand deals or creator fund income, this is a real gap.
LinkedIn has a memorialization option for deceased members. X, formerly Twitter, has a process for deactivating accounts of deceased users at family request, but no transfer mechanism. Blue Sky doesn't have a formal policy on death or disability. You can let the account go dormant by doing nothing, or you can get it deactivated or deleted if you provide them with proof of death and proof of legal authority, like being the estate executor.
Mastodon is even trickier because there's no formal centralized policy on death or disability, and the admin for the specific server for your account has to be contacted to see [00:15:00] what that server's policies are on handling an account under death or disability.
The pattern you're seeing across all of these is the platforms were designed for individual users, and the legal and operational infrastructure for business continuity after the user is gone is an afterthought at best. - Now let's look at a category of platform we should spend some serious time on because it is a wrinkle that makes it different from everything else we've covered so far.
Now, with a Shopify store or YouTube channel, if you die or become incapacitated, the main problem is the business stops and people move on, and that is a loss, but your customers are not actively owed anything at that moment except fulfillment of existing orders. With subscription platforms like Patreon, Substack, OnlyFans, Buy Me a Coffee, or Ko-fi, your subscribers are paying you money right now, monthly in most cases, and if you can't deliver what they're paying for, you have an obligation problem [00:16:00] that sits on top of everything else.
Patreon and Substack are probably the most common of these for creators in the business and education space. On Patreon, your patrons are making recurring payments in exchange for exclusive content, early access, community membership, or whatever you've promised them. On Substack, paid subscribers are paying for your newsletter plus whatever subscriber-only content you've committed to.
If you die or are incapacitated, those charges keep running until someone pauses or cancels the subscription billing. Patrons and subscribers are paying for something they're not receiving. That creates a legal obligation on your estate, not necessarily a lawsuit, but a real obligation to either fulfill or refund, and your estate cannot fulfill because the whole point is that you are not there to create the content.
Patreon does have an account transfer process. They've handled these situations, and their support team will work with estates, but it requires [00:17:00] documentation, and it doesn't happen automatically. Same with Substack, which has explicit provisions for transferring publications to a new owner. The mechanism exists.
It just needs someone who knows how to activate it. The disability version of this is actually more manageable if you plan for it.
If you have a trusted person who can post to your Patreon, like a team member, a business partner, or a co-creator, you can maintain the subscription during a recovery period, but they need access before the crisis, not during it. Buy Me a Coffee and Ko-fi work similarly, and I'm gonna lump them together because the issues are nearly identical.
Both allow one-time tips and monthly memberships. Both pay out to a connected bank account. Both are tied to an individual creator account. The stakes are a bit lower here than with Patreon because the membership model is generally less formal with fewer explicit content commitments. But if you're generating meaningful revenue through either platform, the same access [00:18:00] and bank account problems apply.
The payout is going to whatever bank account you linked when you set it up, and if your heirs can't access that bank account or the platform account, that revenue stream is in limbo OnlyFans is used by creators across a huge range of content categories: fitness instructors, chefs, musicians, educators, and yes, adult content creators.
Whatever you're using it for, the legal issues are the same. OnlyFans presents the same subscription obligation problem as Patreon. Subscribers are paying monthly, and if the account goes dark, they're owed either content or refunds.
But it has an additional layer of complexity the other platforms do not. The content on OnlyFans account may be deeply personal, intimate, private, something the creator may have very specific feelings about who should ever see it or manage it. If you're incapacitated or die, who has access to your OnlyFans account?
Is that someone you want to have access to that [00:19:00] content? Have you even told anyone it exists? This is a category where your succession plan has to explicitly address not just access, but who gets access and what they're authorized to do.
Closing the account and pausing billing may be the right answer. Continuing to operate may be the right answer, but nobody knows and nobody planned for this is a genuinely bad outcome in a way that goes beyond the financial. OnlyFans support reportedly works with estates on account closure and related requests, and the support team handles these.
But you need a plan, and you need to tell someone. Medium is a publishing platform, and if you've been publishing there, you may or may not be enrolled in the Medium Partner Program, the program that pays you based on how much time paying Medium members spend reading your content. If you're generating meaningful revenue through Medium, it's worth knowing that Medium can memorialize accounts of deceased members and that your published content continues to exist and generate [00:20:00] reads even if the account is memorialized.
Medium is probably the lowest stakes platform on this list in terms of succession complexity. Your articles are there. The partner program pays to a connected payment account. The main thing to document is the account access and the linked payment method. Now let's switch to Twitch and other streaming and community platforms.
Twitch is worth its own conversation because it has a problem no other platform in this episode has. The asset requires a live human being to exist. A YouTube channel keeps generating views, ad revenue, and subscriber value long after a creator stops posting. A Substack keeps delivering the archive to paid subscribers.
But Twitch is built around live streaming. The moment you stop streaming because you're in the hospital, because you died, because you're recovering from surgery, the revenue stops. The community stays, but the thing that created the community and what the community is there for [00:21:00] primarily is not something anyone can replicate for you or manage on your behalf.
That said, there is still real value to plan for. If you have an active Twitch channel with significant subscriber and bits income, that revenue does not automatically wind down cleanly. , Subscribers are charged for the current billing cycle regardless of whether you stream. If you die or become incapacitated, someone needs to communicate with your community and manage the channel.
Twitch has handled account memorialization for deceased streamers, and they have a process for submitting documentation. But like most platforms, it was not designed with succession in mind. Two specific things to document, your Twitch affiliate or partner status, because that determines how revenue is structured and paid out, and your clip and VOD library, because many Twitch broadcasts are automatically deleted after a limited retention period unless archived or converted into highlights.
If there's content in your Twitch archive that has value, like highlights or recordings of [00:22:00] important streams, someone needs to know how to download it, because once it's gone, it's gone. For disability, if you have a co-streamer or team who already has access to your channel's management dashboard, they can keep the community informed and manage the account.
If you're a solo streamer with no one else in the channel management, the account is as isolated as your personal Instagram
Discord is different from almost every other platform in this episode because the thing you built there is explicitly a community, and community ownership is transferable in a way that your personal account on most other platforms is not. If you have built a Discord server, a brand community, a creator community, a product or a course community, a fan server, that server has real value.
It's an organized, engaged audience. Well, technically. It may have custom bots, roles, channels, and culture that took years to build. And Discord, unlike most platforms, has a built-in [00:23:00] mechanism for transferring server ownership to another member. Now, if you're the sole owner of your server and you become incapacitated or die, the server doesn't automatically transfer to anyone.
It stays under your account, which perhaps nobody can access. Your community is there, but nobody with authority may be managing it. In a community that is actively used, this creates problems quickly. Moderation lapses, bad actors can fill the void, members leave. Discord indeed. The solution here is straightforward, and it's something you can do right now.
Promote a trusted person to co-owner or admin of your server, not just a moderator. Discord allows administrators with extensive permissions, and server ownership can be transferred. For servers that are a part of a business, like a paid community, a course Discord, or brand server, the ownership and access should follow the same logic as your other business accounts.
It is an asset and treat it as one
[00:24:00] Part. I promise now we're getting close to the end of the social media part of this list. Let's talk about WhatsApp and Telegram. If you use WhatsApp Business or Telegram channels as part of how you run your business to communicate with customers, run a paid community channel, manage a team, those accounts are tied to your phone number.
If your phone is inaccessible, the account may be inaccessible. The practical solution is the same as everything else. Document it, . make sure someone knows it exists, and in the case of Telegram channels where you've built a real audience, make sure another admin has ownership-level access.
For most people, a Reddit account is just a personal account, and it's not worth putting in your estate plan. The exception is if you have built and moderate a significant subreddit, a community with, say, tens of thousands of members that generates real traffic or has been part of how you built your audience.
Reddit's mod structure allows you to add other moderators and to transfer ownership of a subreddit to [00:25:00] another mod. If you've built something valuable there, make sure someone else has mod access and knows what to do with it. If you're posting on Reddit as a business and want that to continue, if you can't for any reason, plan for that.
If you run Snapchat professionally, you're in the Snapchat Stars program, you run paid promotions, you have a significant following you actively monetize, document it and document your access information. For most business owners and creators, Snapchat is relatively low stakes, in the succession context, because the content is designed to disappear, and there's no deep archive to worry about.
Pinterest business accounts, affiliate marketing through Pinterest, and Pinterest creator content are all worth documenting if Pinterest is a meaningful part of your traffic or revenue. Pinterest content is persistent. Pins you created years ago may still be driving traffic to your site or affiliate links today. Document it and make sure someone has access and move on. Let's shift [00:26:00] gears a little bit finally and look at domain names and websites. Your domain name is a different animal from your social media accounts, and in some ways it is more straightforward, but the failure mode can be faster and more permanent.
Domain names are registered through registrars, companies like Porkbun, GoDaddy, Namecheap, and others. Your registration is a contract with a specific term, typically one to ten years, with renewal required.
The domain does not belong to you in the way your house belongs to you. You are licensing the right to use it. When the license expires, if it's not renewed, the domain becomes available to anyone right away. Domain names expire quickly. Most registrars do send renewal notice emails, but what if they're going to an email address that's not being actively monitored?
Auto-renewal is great, but it may be tied to a credit card that may have been canceled. Management may be tied to an account no one but [00:27:00] you has access to. If you're in the hospital or have died and nobody is managing this, your domain could expire and be snapped up by a third party in the time it takes your estate to figure out what assets you had.
This is not theoretical. Domain names with any business value are watched by automated systems. The moment a valuable domain becomes available, investors and competitors know. A domain name you built a business around for fifteen years can be gone within days of the expiration. Domain names can be transferred through the registrar's process, but again, it requires someone to know the domain exists, know where it is registered, have access to the registrar account, and have authority to make the transfer.
All of that needs to be set up before you need it. Your website itself, the hosting account, the content management system, the SSL certificate, the email accounts attached to the domain, all of that lives in accounts that have the same access problem. And for a [00:28:00] WordPress site or a Squarespace site or a Shopify store, the content and the technical infrastructure are both at risk if no one has access. . Next is actually some of the better news in this episode, so enjoy it while it lasts. Your email list, the actual list of subscribers, their email addresses, their history, is one of your most transferable digital assets.
Unlike your social media following, which lives on a platform that controls access, your email list is data that you can export. You can download it. You can give it to someone. You can move it to a different platform. The email marketing platforms like MailChimp, Klaviyo, Flodesk, and Substack all have account processes that can, with proper authorization and documentation, be transferred to a new owner or successor.
As I mentioned before, Substack in particular has explicit provisions for transferring publications. The condition is the same as everything else. Someone has to know the list exists, know which platform it lives on, have access to the account, and have [00:29:00] authority to make decisions about it.
A thirty-thousand-person email list can be an extraordinarily valuable asset. If you've been building an email list, document it, not just the platform, but the list size, the engagement rates, the segments, the automated sequences, and how to access it. Anyone inheriting this asset needs to know what they have.
Now, if you're creating products, physical or digital, and selling them through online stores, Etsy, Shopify, and Amazon all present the same basic challenge: account access with slightly different transfer mechanics. Shopify is actually pretty good here. A Shopify store is a business asset that can be transferred to a new owner through Shopify's platform.
If your business is organized as an LLC and the Shopify account is owned by the LLC, it passes with the business. If it's in your personal name, you can transfer store ownership through the platform with proper authorization. Etsy's terms of service do say that the accounts are [00:30:00] non-transferable and that they're personal to you.
In practice, Etsy has worked with families to transfer shops in estate situations, but it's not guaranteed, and it does require documentation and Etsy's cooperation, which we all know is not something easy to get.
If your Etsy shop represents a significant business asset, the terms of service issue is worth knowing about. Amazon seller accounts are notoriously difficult to transfer. Amazon ties seller accounts to individuals and business entities in complex ways, and the succession process is not straightforward.
If you sell significantly on Amazon, this is worth researching specifically for your account type and structure. Digital product platforms like Gumroad, Teachable, Podia, Kajabi, and Thinkific usually treat accounts as business accounts that can be transferred with proper documentation. The key is knowing which platform your products live on and having account access and authority documented.
I'm gonna say just a few more words [00:31:00] here about the Amazon seller account succession issues If you're an individual seller and you die, your estate needs to notify Amazon and go through their account succession process.
If you're selling under a business entity and the entity is properly structured and continues to exist, the transition is more manageable. If you're the sole proprietor of an Amazon FBA business with significant inventory stored in Amazon's warehouses, that inventory has real dollar value. It's sitting at Amazon's fulfillment centers, and it needs someone with account access and legal authority to management.
The account suspension risk is real here. Amazon account health monitoring is aggressive, and if an account goes unmanaged during an estate dispute, no one's responding to performance notifications, if order defect rates climb, Amazon may suspend the account before the estate can manage it. A suspended Amazon seller account is dramatically harder to work with than an active one.
Document your seller account structure now. Note whether the account is individual or [00:32:00] business, what entity own it-- what entity owns it, what inventory is in FBA, what your account health metrics are, and who would have authority to manage it. And if your Amazon business is a significant part of your income, your business attorney needs to know this exists when helping you structure your succession plan.
Let's look specifically at podcasting now because the architecture of a podcast is complicated compared to other platforms, and the failure mode can be fast and total. Your podcast doesn't live in one place. It's a layered system. You record the audio somewhere, you edit it somewhere, you upload it to a hosting platform.
That hosting platform generates an RSS feed, and that RSS feed is what Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeart, and everywhere else actually reads and distributes from. The RSS feed is the spine of your entire podcast distribution. If your hosting account lapses because the credit card on file expires, because no one's paying the monthly fee, [00:33:00] because the account gets deactivated after inactivity, the RSS feed breaks, and when the RSS feed breaks, all hell breaks loose.
The good news is that podcast hosting accounts generally are transferable. Buzzsprout, Libsyn, Transistor, Podbean, , Spotify for Podcasters, all of these have processes for transferring account ownership with proper authorization.
The bad news is that none of them do it automatically, and someone has to know the account exists and know to do it. For recording and production, if you record through a platform like Descript, Riverside FM, SquadCast, Zencastr, or a similar tool, your recorded sessions live in that platform's cloud storage unless you've saved them to your computer.
Document what you use, where the files are, and whether your recordings are backed up somewhere accessible. An archive of your show has value. Many podcasters never back up their original recordings anywhere outside their hosting platform, though.
If you hear [00:34:00] barking in the background, my dog is getting ready to go to the dog park and cannot contain himself. Apple Podcasts Connect and Spotify for Podcasters are both separate accounts from your hosting platform. Your show may be claimed and verified on both, and those claimed accounts may have listener analytics, review management tools, or direct subscriber data that lives only in those accounts.
Document them separately. Podcast revenue accounts are the hardest to transfer. Google AdSense is tied to a specific person or business entity. Affiliate program accounts often have strict terms about who can own the account. Patreon has a process for transferring creator accounts, but it does require working through their support team.
Most of the podcast succession issues are not insurmountable, but every single one requires advanced preparation. None of them work without someone knowing they exist. Now I wanna talk about something really different, crowdfunding.
Kickstarter and Indiegogo are project-based [00:35:00] crowdfunding platforms. You run a campaign, your backers pledge money, usually to get a specific reward, a product, early access, their name in the credits, something. The campaign funds. The money moves to you, and now you have a legal obligation to deliver what you promised.
Crowdfunding campaigns can create contractual and consumer protection obligations under platform terms and applicable state laws. When your backers pledged to your campaign, they entered into an agreement with you that you would deliver the thing you promised or you would refund the money.
Kickstarter's own terms reinforce this. Creators are legally obligated to fulfill rewards or issue refunds if they can't. Now, here's why this matters for incapacity and death planning. If you're running a campaign or if you have a funded campaign with unfulfilled rewards, your estate inherits that obligation.
If you die mid-campaign before funding is complete, the outcome depends on whether the campaign is all or nothing, Kickstarter's [00:36:00] default model, or flexible funding, which is more common on Indiegogo. With all or nothing, a campaign that has not hit its goal will not charge backers, so the obligation is limited.
With flexible funding, backers may already have been charged, and those charges do create those obligations even if the campaign never delivers. If you die after a campaign is funded but before rewards have shipped, which is entirely possible for a hardware product, a creative project, or a book, your estate is holding your backers' money.
There are documented cases of crowdfunding creators dying mid-project, and their families having to navigate both the grief and the legal and logistical reality of several thousand people who are owed something. Sometimes the project gets completed by family or collaborators. Sometimes the estate refunds everyone.
Sometimes, unfortunately, the project just goes dark and backers get nothing, and some of them end up filing claims against the estate.
The disability scenario here is actually where I see the most immediate risk for [00:37:00] working creators. A serious accident or illness during an active campaign is not an unrealistic scenario. If you're the sole person with authority over your Kickstarter account and your fulfillment process,
that campaign could go off the rails very quickly if you can't manage it. So here's what you need if crowdfunding is part of your business. First, document every active and recently completed campaign. Platform, campaign status, fulfillment status, how many backers, and what is owed to each one of them.
Second, if you have a funded campaign with unfulfilled rewards, document the fulfillment plan in enough detail that someone else could execute it without you. A supplier contact list, a shipping workflow, whatever it takes. Third, think about who has the authority to make decisions about your campaign if you can't.
Can a business partner pause a campaign? Can they communicate with backers? Can they issue refunds if that becomes necessary? They need account access and explicit authority to do that, ideally documented in your power of attorney. Kickstarter and Indiegogo [00:38:00] both have processes for handling creator accounts in estate situations, but neither of them has a streamlined path for incapacity where the creator is alive and can't manage their campaign.
That gap is on you to plan around. I've saved the most foundational issue for near the end because I want you to understand why I'm calling it foundational. Everything we have talked about for the last however many hours or minutes, every account, every platform, every login is secured by something, usually by a password.
And passwords increasingly are secured by a second factor, a text message to your phone, an authenticator app on your phone, a code from your email, your phone, a fingerprint, a face print. Your phone may be the master key to your entire digital life. If your phone is locked and nobody knows your PIN and you're incapacitated or gone, the two-factor authentication on every account you own may be inaccessible.
That means account recovery is locked out. [00:39:00] Password resets may be going to a device nobody can open. Everything is stuck behind a wall that your family can see but can't get through. The PIN or passcode on your phone needs to be something your designated person can find. This is a security risk, I know, but it is a smaller risk to most people than the alternative.
Put it in a sealed envelope in a fire safe. Put it in your password manager. Put it in the same place as your will. Just put it somewhere. Absolutely set up a PIN or passcode method as backup if you usually use a fingerprint or face recognition to unlock your phone. Real life is not like the movies or TV.
The coroner is not going to lop off a finger for you or let you have the head or face for face ID or biometric lock, and you'll be in big trouble if you do it yourself. Your phone number is also tied to a carrier, Verizon, AT&T, T-Mobile, whoever you use. If that number is not ported or kept active after you die or are incapacitated, it gets recycled. When [00:40:00] your phone number is recycled to a new customer, every account that has that number as a recovery option becomes permanently more complicated to access. Carriers do have processes to transfer a phone number to an estate or family member, but it requires a death certificate, and it takes time.
In the interim, your number needs to stay active, and someone needs to be receiving those texts. For short-term disability, if you're hospitalized and your phone is locked in a hospital safe or it was damaged after an accident, you have the same authentication problem.
Your authorized agent can't log into your accounts. They can't receive your two-factor codes. They're stuck. This is solvable with backup authentication codes with an authenticator app that is accessible on a second device with a trusted person who already has access, but it does require preparation Let's look at Apple.
Apple introduced something called the Digital Legacy program in twenty twenty-one. It is genuinely one of the better things any tech company [00:41:00] has built for succession planning, and most people never turned it on. The Digital Legacy program lets you designate legacy contracts, up to five people who can request access to your iCloud account after you die.
Each legacy contact gets an access key, which they use along with a death certificate to request access. Once Apple approves it, they can access much of the data stored in iCloud, including photos, notes, files, and other synced content. What they can't access is anything DRM-protected, including App Store purchases, music from Apple Music, movies from iTunes, books from Apple Books.
Those licenses unfortunately die with the account. This is not a small thing for a creator who has built a library of licensed tools and software through the App Store. Those purchases are just gone. Legacy contacts also can't access iCloud Keychain, which has saved passwords, payment info, and Apple Pay cards.
Go to your Apple ID settings right now and add a legacy contact. It [00:42:00] takes five minutes. If you use Apple Business Manager, that is a separate account from your personal Apple ID and has its own administrative structure.
Document that separately. Microsoft takes a different approach than Apple, and it is less elegant. Microsoft does not have a designated heir program with a transferable access key. It has a next-of-kin process through which family members may request access to certain account contents. The bigger concern for business owners is Microsoft three sixty-five.
Outlook, Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint, Word, Excel, and the subscription lapses because no one is paying the bill, your entire Microsoft business ecosystem goes into a limited access state and eventually becomes inaccessible. The data is not immediately deleted, but access is restricted, and recovery after the fact can be complicated.
For solo business owners who are the only administrator on their Microsoft three sixty-five account, add a second administrator. It's a setting in the [00:43:00] Microsoft three sixty-five admin center. It means someone else has the ability to manage the subscription and access the account without being you.
This is one of the more high-impact things you can do for business continuity, and most small business owners have never done it.
Now I want to come back to the accident scenario I opened with because I think the disability situation is actually underappreciated compared to death. When someone dies, there's a legal process, a death certificate, probate or a small estate affidavit, an executor or trustee with legal authority.
Platforms have seen this scenario before and sometimes at least have some process for it, imperfect as it may be. Now, when someone's incapacitated, say in the hospital recovering from a stroke, going through a long illness, dealing with a mental health crisis, the situation is legally messier and emotionally can be very difficult.
When someone's incapacitated, such as being in the hospital, recovering from a stroke, going through a long illness, dealing with a mental health [00:44:00] crisis, the situation is legally messier. Your power of attorney, if you have one, gives someone authority to manage your legal and financial affairs.
However, many platforms are not very good at accepting a power of attorney as a basis for allowing someone else to log into your account, even if they're supposed to legally. They didn't write their terms of service with that scenario in mind, and they're not really equipped to verify the document even if they wanted to.
Then there's the problem that many people don't have a power of attorney document set up in the first place. Short-term disability, weeks or months, is more likely than death for most people under sixty, but the business may not be able to pause for the crisis. Customers keep ordering, domain renewals keep coming, your email sequences keep sending, your ad campaigns keep running.
Someone needs to be managing this on your behalf. The most practical way to reduce the risk is doing something about it before the need arises, and you never know when it might arise. [00:45:00] You need a designated person, and they need actual access, not just a legal document authorizing them to access something they can't reach.
Now, I have talked on and on about many of the things that can go wrong. Let's shift to what you can do to prevent much of that. Here is that action list. I made this very practical on purpose. And it's backed up by a checklist you can get on my website.
The link is in the description. Number one, build your digital asset inventory. Write down every digital asset connected to your business. Think hard, because there will be way more than you initially think about. Every social media account and the email address it's attached to, every domain name, the registrar, the renewal date, and the payment method, your email marketing platform and list size, every online store or marketplace account, every digital product platform, your podcast hosting account, your ad revenue accounts, your affiliate accounts.
For each one, what is it? Where does it live? [00:46:00] What is the login email address? And what would happen to the business if this account went dark for a month? This is the document your designated person needs. Like I said, I built a checklist to go along with this episode, it will be in the show notes, that walks you through exactly what to document.
Download it, fill it in, put it somewhere your person can find. Number two, set up Google's Inactive Account Manager and Apple's Legacy Contract Program today. Google's Inactive Account Manager and Apple's Legacy Contact program are not just practical conveniences.
Under that act I mentioned way back at the beginning of this episode, that three-tier framework, these designations are tier one. They legally override contradictory language in your will. If you set them up and your estate documents say something different, the platform tool will generally control. That makes them perhaps the highest priority action on this entire list.
Go to myaccount.google.com and set up Inactive Account Manager. Go to your iPhone settings, tap your name, [00:47:00] find Password & Security, and add a legacy contact. Both of these take under ten minutes and are legally powerful succession planning moves you can make right now.
If your business depends on Google or Apple in any way, this is the bare minimum. Number three, add a co-admin to your critical business accounts before you need to. Not your personal Instagram account, I understand the privacy instinct there, but your business page, your Facebook Business Manager, your YouTube Studio, if you're comfortable with it, your Shopify store, your MailChimp account, any account where someone else being able to get in could keep your business running during a crisis.
Most platforms allow multiple administrators on business accounts. Use that feature. Choose someone you trust. Give them the access now, so you're not trying to do it from a hospital bed all pumped full of good drugs.
Four, use a password manager with emergency access. The major password managers all have some version of emergency access. You designate a trusted contact. They can request [00:48:00] access to your vault. There's usually a waiting period during which you can deny the request if you're able to. If you don't deny it because you can't, they get in.
This is a practical solution to the password problem. It's not perfect, but it is an option. Number five, make sure you have a power of attorney and that your power of attorney explicitly includes digital assets and online business accounts. Many older powers of attorney totally leave this out. So even if you have a power of attorney, check it to see if it covers digital assets.
Under that three-tier system I mentioned before, your estate documents are tier two, the fallback when platform tools are not in place. A digitally explicit POA gives your agent a statutory basis to request access the platforms are more likely to recognize and process. Like I said, a lot of older POA documents predate the digital economy entirely.
They were drafted when online business accounts just weren't really considered property worth [00:49:00] naming. An updated document that specifically authorizes your agent to manage digital accounts, online businesses, and electronic records gives them the legal foundation to work from when they're dealing with a platform that would otherwise say no.
This is the conversation to have with your estate attorney. Six, if your digital business is your livelihood, talk to your business attorney about structuring it at the entity level. This is that structural move that makes everything else in this list easier. If your core business accounts, your domain, your email platform, your online store, your ad accounts are owned by your LLC rather than by you personally, they're business assets that pass with the business.
Whoever succeeds you as member or manager of the LLC has authority over those accounts. You're not fighting platform by platform with death certificates and probate paperwork. You're dealing with one question: Who's managing the LLC now? A well-drafted operating agreement addresses what happens to the business when a member dies or becomes incapacitated, and that means it is doing [00:50:00] succession planning work for your digital business at the same time.
If you listened to the episode on operating agreements, you know this is exactly the kind of scenario a good one is built to handle. If you haven't listened to that episode, it's worth going back to. Link is in the show notes. This doesn't mean that moving everything into an LLC solves the authentication problem. Passwords and two-factor authentication don't care who owns the account legally, but it dramatically simplifies the authority problem, which is the one that creates the longest delays and the most friction when someone's trying to step in and keep your business running.
Seven, have the conversation. Tell someone. Tell your business partner, your spouse, your closest trusted person, whoever you've designated. Tell them that this document exists, where it is, and what to do with it. Tell them which accounts matter most. Tell them who to call. Now, you don't need to hand over all your passwords today.
You need to make sure that when the moment comes, someone knows enough to know where to start. [00:51:00] This topic, IP legacy and digital business succession, is one of the areas where I think there's a real gap in what's available to founders and creators. The traditional estate planning world is not made for online business.
The IP world has not quite caught up enough to digital assets, and the creator economy world is mostly just not really thinking about this at all. That's understandable. It's not pleasant to think about death and disability. I'm developing a deeper resource on this. I don't have all the details yet, but I'm thinking about a comprehensive guide and workshop that takes people through the full digital business succession process.
Not just the checklist I've mentioned, but the actual planning. What to do if you're a solo creator, what to do if you have a business partner, what to do if your business is your only income and you have no safety net. If that sounds like something you'd wanna know more about when I have it ready, get on my newsletter.
That's where I'll announce it first. The link is in the show notes. The checklist for this episode is also available in the show notes. It walks you through [00:52:00] what your digital business needs to have documented so someone can step in if you can't. Download it.
Actually fill it in. This is one of those things that maybe takes an afternoon and then just lives there doing its job. . If you wanna go further than a checklist, if you wanna actually audit your business structure and make sure your IP and digital assets are set up to survive you, you can book a consultation with me.
The link is at kingpatentlaw.com. And if you haven't done part one yet, go back to the episode from a few weeks ago. That one is about the formal IP side, your trademarks, your patents, what actually happens to them when you die or when you're incapacitated. Today's episode and that one are designed to work together.
Thanks for being here. I'll see you next week. I'm Julie King with King Patent Law. If you're ready to protect your brand and business, book a consultation at kingpatentlaw.com. Avoid the legal horrors and keep rocking your IP. This is not legal advice, and I'm not your lawyer. For advice about your specific situation, consult with a licensed attorney.
This contains attorney advertising material. Firm [00:53:00] address and contact information are available at kingpatentlaw.com.