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22 ERA F. 1 (2021)

handle is hein.journals/erafrum22 and id is 1 raw text is: ERA Forum (2021) 22:1-7 https://doi.org/l0.1007/s12027-021-00652-y | | ||...I l What happens to your social media account when you die? The first German judgments on digital legacy Angelika Fuchs1 E RA aROPAtsCHE HECHTEAKADEMIE ACADEMY OF EUROPEANo LAW Accepted: 4 February 2021 / Published online: 10 February 2021 © @ ERA 2021 AEs-Paa The digital estate is becoming a major focus of discussions on both national and international inheritance law. It has also become a popular topic at the ERA Annual Conference on European Succession Lawi and advisory practice will have to increas- ingly take it into account. Recently, the first German judgments have been delivered: they focus on the ques- tion of whether an account on a social network with all its communication content can pass to the user's heirs by way of universal succession and moreover if and how access to the account has to be granted. These issues at stake have been at the centre of a legal dispute lasting several years between the parents of a fifteen-year-old girl who was the victim of a fatal incident in 2012 and Facebook. This article follows the chronology of the judgments delivered by the Berlin Re- gional Court, the Court of Appeal and the Federal Supreme Court - in a first and in a second round - with the final decision of the Federal Supreme Court eventually issued in late summer 2020. 1 Facts On the evening of 3 December 2012, a fifteen-year-old girl was fatally struck, under as yet unexplained circumstances, by an underground train entering a station. The 1A workshop on digital inheritance organised by Dr Stephanie Herzog and Professor Francesco Paolo Patti took place at the most recent Annual Conference on Succession Law, held on 5-6 November 2020. ] A. Fuchs afuchs @era.int 1 Head of Section European Private Law, ERA, Trier, Germany '_ Springer