Who Gets to Decide If You Stay Dead?

The global legal scoreboard on Meta's ghost patent

In the free version of this newsletter, I walked through Meta’s ghost patent (their desire to continue your digital life for the purpose of monetizing you) and what it actually says. The age simulations. The intimacy calibration. The continuous loop with no off switch. The consent of a dead person.

But there’s a question I kept coming back to: how is this even legal?

I spent the week digging into patent law, post-mortem data rights, and AI regulation across eight jurisdictions (with significant help from Claude). What I found is both infuriating and, in a weird way, hopeful.

Infuriating because the US is structurally incapable of saying no to this patent. Hopeful because a lot of other countries already have the tools to block it, restrict it, or punish it. And a legal concept is emerging that didn’t exist five years ago: the right to be left dead.

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