I recently had a discussion with a Roon user about how his Estate might deal with his Roon licence and digital music collection after his death. I thought there was a lot in it that might be relevant and of assistance to other users, as well as some areas where further development by Roon could be desirable.
I set out below my understanding of various issues. Nothing I say in this post should be taken as legal advice. I am not acting as a lawyer for anyone in relation to these matters and before relying on anything in a serious way you should obtain your own advice.
Dealing firstly with Roon licences the licence terms are set out here (Terms). The Terms do not provide for the licence to terminate upon death, but obviously a lifetime licence will do so. I understand that means that the remaining term of a periodic licence, whether monthly or annually, will continue under the control of an executor.
The Terms provide that a Roon licence cannot be sold or transferred. The EU Oracle case permitting secondary sales is limited to software with an indeterminate term. Roon licences are limited in time. Accordingly a Roon licence is not an asset in the administration of the Estate and cannot be left to a beneficiary in a will.
The rights surrounding a digital music collection will depend upon local copyright legislation and the terms attaching to any digital downloads. In Australia we can rip CDs as a backup for private use, but we cannot sell those backups. I will assume for the balance of this post that a digital music collection cannot be sold or transferred and so does not form an asset in the Estate. I would be interested to hear from anyone who believes their collection may be transferrable.
Given the above, the main interest that Roon users might have in succession issues is transferring of information within a Roon Core to a surviving family member with their own Roon licence.
That information might include:
- playlists, tags, history and favourites stored in a Roon profile; or
- metadata edits made in Roon.
Profiles are intended to be used by members of a single household, so it is quite possible that people would have an interest in transferring them to their own accounts when the licence holder dies.
Roonâs primary purpose is not metadata curation. It is intended to automatically scrape metadata from various sources, including file tags, and present it to the user without effort on the part of the user. It is possible to edit some metadata in Roon and to tell it to prefer the edits, but anyone intending to seriously curate a musical collection would be better placed relying on file tags rather than edits to Roon metadata.
Nevertheless, there are people who have spent many hours curating metadata in Roon and you could expect them to hope that they could pass on the benefit of such edits to any family member who inherits their musical collection.
The problem is that SFAIK it is not possible to transfer any of the above information to a new Roon licence. Cores are tied to accounts and cannot be transferred between them or merged with another account.
How do you feel about your collection ? Is there anything in it that you would want to transfer to family members upon your death ? Does your household use Profiles as envisaged by the developers ? What would you want to see Roon do as regards that information ?
Personally I donât feel there is anything in my Roon Core that I would want or need my daughters to have. They arenât particularly interested in Roon, but the youngest is interested in music and audio and I expect she would be interested in my gear and collection after my death.