디지털유산 중 비공개 정보의 상속성

It is questionable whether the policy that domestic information and communication service providers refusing to provide information that subject was producing or storing to his inheritee upon the death fits the inheritance law. Considering the enormous amount of digital information that continues to increase even now, the issue of inheritance of digital heritage is urgently needed to establish a legal rule, and legislative measures must be taken to support it. Since 2010, the National Assembly has proposed amendments to the Act on Promotion of Information and Communication Network Utilization and Information Protection, etc. to solve the problem of inheritance of digital heritage. However, the law was abolished. in fact, the law was limited in scope and focused on the protection of personal information. Among the information, non-public information is the biggest problem because the heirs do not know the content and existence of the information. If all non-public information is recognized as the subject of inheritance, the heir will be able to request the provision of all information. But otherwise, heirs would only be able to claim copyright and would not even know what the work is. According to this problem, various studies that Especially, focusing on the property of digital information have been conducted on the inheritance of digital information. On the other hand, there is an opinion that information is viewed as a kind of property, but information that does not have the possibility of exclusive control cannot be viewed as a property. Instead, It is reasonable that the heirs took over the status of parties to the contract or service use bond was inherited. Please note, The service use bond is the right to request access and provision of information, not the right to use the account. Since both the information subject and the heir have interests in the service use bond, denying inheritance is unfair and invalid. In contrast, the inheritance of account use rights may be denied. This argument is consistent with the recent ruling of the German Supreme Court. In case Beschl. v. 27.08.2020, Az. III ZB30/20, The court declaring that the status of the use contract that the heir had concluded with the SNS operator was transferred to the heir, and found that there was no basis to regard this contractual status as being exclusive. In the following, the above arguments will be described in detail, the rulings of the German Supreme Court will be introduced, and the direction for the inheritance legislation of digital heritage will be presented.