The Morbid War Over Online Obituaries

Jane White Thompson died in August. A blood clot traveled from her leg into her lungs, and in a flash, she was gone. “It was very quick and very unexpected,” says her husband, Joel Thompson, who is 62 years old and lives in Houston.

Soon after, Thompson and his stepdaughter wrote an obituary. It described how Jane, an avid baker, was known as “The Cheesecake Lady” and how she had two dogs, Tugs and Cash. Less than three days later, a company called Echovita published on its website a summary of what they had written. It said Tug and Cash were Jane’s “close friends,” failing to note that they were dogs. Her granddaughter became a grandson. And her children weren’t mentioned as survivors. “It looks like a fourth grader did it,” Joel Thompson says. “She would be very embarrassed if people were reading that, thinking that’s her obituary.”

Jane’s death had become fodder in a morbid, online war. Over the past 20 years, obituaries have turned into prized commodities, valuable enough to power much of a billion-dollar business and attract what some funeral directors call “obituary pirates,” who prey on the online information of the dead. The competition has intensified during the pandemic, which has killed more than 800,000 Americans.

In July, Service Corporation International, a New York Stock Exchange–traded conglomerate that owns 1,500 funeral homes, sued Echovita. It alleged that the Quebec-based company scraped details from obituaries, including Jane Thompson’s, from SCI’s website and republished them. “Mining people’s personal data—at the lowest point in their lives—is disappointing,” a spokesperson for the funeral conglomerate says in an email.

Pascal “Paco” Leclerc, who says he owns Echovita, claims that his company’s mission is virtuous. He’s informing the public of recent deaths, and families, he says, can publish obituaries on his website for free. “In reality, the funeral homes should never be the owner of an obituary,” he says in an interview. “The obituary’s purpose is to share the information with the public.”

Leclerc has come under fire for alleged obituary piracy in the past. In 2019, a judge in Canada ordered Afterlife, where Leclerc was a director, to pay $20 million in damages in a class-action suit for violating copyright by republishing obituaries in full. Leclerc says he was “a silent investor” in Afterlife, which was run by a partner he declines to name.

A month after the Canadian lawsuit was filed in January 2018, Leclerc says he started Echovita to rehabilitate his reputation. “I’m going to prove with a new business model that I’m trying to help society,” he says. The company crawls the web looking for new obituaries, then publishes a summary. Because Echovita isn’t copying obituaries directly, it skirts the copyright issue that damaged Afterlife, says Scott Gilligan, general counsel for the National Funeral Directors Association, in an interview.

Funeral directors are not appeased. “The site is guilty of flimflamming the unsuspecting public into believing that the family of the decedent is somehow connected with the website,” Gilligan wrote in an industry trade publication.

Echovita is not the only company employing such tactics. Barbara Kemmis, executive director for the Cremation Association of North America, says reports of obituary piracy are on the rise. Some families in Detroit have complained about a website that republished death notices under different names to raise money for someone else’s funeral, says Phil Douma, executive director of the Michigan Funeral Directors Association. In February, the Bereavement Authority of Ontario warned of websites that purportedly sell flowers and other services alongside copied obituaries. Instead of sending families the gifts, these websites allegedly pocket the money. “It’s not going to go away, because it’s so darn easy to do,” says David Brazeau, a spokesperson for the Bereavement Authority, a government agency.