Dividing digital assets

Technology and the internet permeate nearly every aspect of life today – not only are mobile phones, iPods, iPads, e-readers, digital cameras and computers vital to our everyday lives but so is the technology and data that are crucial to our use and enjoyment of these items. And while some of these items only take up a small amount of space – or even only virtual space – they can take 100s or 1000s of dollars to accumulate.

So, in the case of divorce or relationship breakdown, what happens to these assets and data?

Splitting up today means couples need to consider what to do with items beyond the house and the car or even the pots and pans. It extends to technology devices like phones, tablets, laptops, e-readers, Xbox, and gets even more complicated with intangible items like cloud data, iTunes and Flickr accounts.

The process is simpler if things have been kept separate – you each keep your physical assets such as your own phone, e-reader, camera and computer – as well as your iTunes account and file sharing system (photos, e-books, downloaded movies etc) – and then you can reset privacy settings, un-friend or de-follow the in-laws etc, and start to move on.

But, for couples who have merged all their technology, share social media accounts and maybe even store it all conveniently in one giant, familial cloud, then the situation is murkier. If you can’t agree on how these assets are to be divided between you (by allocating items in the account to another account, for example) then in a contentious separation, details on how to divide digital goods like a shared photo site or an extensive movie streaming library will increasingly be addressed in negotiated Financial Agreements and Consent Orders or will even have to be determined by a Judge.

Perhaps less common – although certainly an emerging issue – is how to settle virtual assets (non-physical objects purchased online for use in online communities and games) purchased during a marriage or relationship. In ‘Second Life’ and other online games, people spend real-world currency to buy goods and features like pets, coins, avatar clothing and weapons, and even virtual real estate for these and other online activities. In some games, players trade and sell these goods and can convert them back to real-world currency, often for a profit. As an extreme example, in the multiplayer Entropia Universe a player sold a virtual nightclub for over US$600,000 – prior to sale that player was making around US$200,000 annually from other players purchasing virtual goods and services.

As the prevalence of digital technology and virtual assets is only likely to continue the division of these items following the breakdown in a marriage or relationship is growing issue.