Digital inheritance: legal challenges in Malaysia

Administration of digital assets or digital inheritance is one of the emerging areas of law especially in the digital era and the development of industrial revolution 4.0. The concept of digital inheritance would have seemed absurd within a decade ago. However, in recent years, a great deal of our property has been replaced by digital asset and a whole virtual estate may now exist upon death. Due to their unique characteristics, digital assets have now caused complication to the current administration of estates law and inheritance system which traditionally focused on the individual’s tangible belongings, financial assets, and real estate. Hence, this paper aims to discuss the current legal framework and the challenges relating to the digital inheritance. For this purpose, the discussion adopts the doctrinal analysis by examining the existing primary and secondary materials including statutory provisions, case law and other legal and non-legal literature related to the digital inheritance. This paper concludes that a proper framework is needed to explain the meanings and establish legal provisions regarding the transfer of digital assets to the beneficiaries of the deceased since all these assets are new and have a unique nature that makes them special from other forms of tangible assets. Policies of social networks to regulate the digital account need to be developed as to settle the current challenges. The absence of regulatory actions towards regulating such area of law creates a lot of confusions. Hence, it is important to have legislative changes in the law by incorporating digital inheritance to the current legal system.