How would you get around the legal aspects of wills in order to make a wiki will a legal document? Certain signatures and witnesses are needed when executing a will.

RE: kshex. Well, if it were my 'home brewed' wiki will, I would upload a graphic of my signature along with a voice (or even video) clip testifying that I wrote the will. The site would log my IP address, and this could be traced back to my ISP account verified to be in my name. But you are right in that certain laws and rules would need to be followed, which would be a major function of the site since they would make sure everything is done legally. If printed signed copies must be mailed in, so be it, but the site would attempt to make as much as possible to be done over the web.

I like the idea --
This should be integrated with similar website services that notify people when you die --
Essentially you write a 'good bye' email to loved ones, and if you don't go online fora certain amount of time it shoots off the email to everyone, assuming you've passed away.

The notice can also contain your usernames and passwords for common websites so that your loved ones can remove content or close out accounts of your on websites.

RE: LogicX. Seems a little dangerous to automatically send "I'm dead" letters to everyone you know if you don't log onto the internet. That would be kind of devastating for your loved ones if it screwed up. But as far as accounts and passwords for digital assets, I think its important and you should be able to update your will to easily and quickly add these things. Ask yourself, if you died today, and one of your CH ideas made it big and started bringing in significant revenue .. would any of your loved ones see any of the money?

I LOVE the idea of a wiki as a will. Although, I believe that every time you changed the wiki then your will would be rendered null and void. Only the last version that was signed, witnessed etc would be valid.

My only other thought on that is to incorporate a digital signature into the will so that every time you modify your will you could somehow digitially sign it. Talking to my lawyers about digital signatures(and this varies by state), but the general feeling is that digital signatures are so new that there hasn't been much case law on it to really say what will and won't hold up in court. So, I think that integrating the digital signature into the changes would be a huge legal challenge.

Now I remember why I hate legal things. This is a great idea if it would hold up in court.

RE: Techguy. Thanks for the positive comments -- as far as digital signatures being too weak, fingerprint scanners and other biometric authentication devices are just around the corner .. I think some laptops are even shipping with fingerprint scanners today, and those should be strong enough to hold up in court. In the meantime, users without high tech biometric devices would probably just have to mail in printed and signed snapshots of the will periodically. (not every time they updated, but a few times a year to ensure that a recent snapshot was completely legal).

^^^^^

To download the PDF for printing, the customer would have to pay a fee of $19.95.