The Seven Points
The protocol establishes a hierarchy of consent for digital stewardship:
- 1. Stewardship over Ownership: Digital remains are held in trust, not owned as property.
- 2. Consent is Non-Transferable: Permission given by the living does not automatically extend to their post-mortem data use.
- 3. The Right to Silence: The dead have a right not to speak. Reanimation requires explicit, specific, prior consent.
- 4. Data Integrity: The archive must be preserved as is, without sanitization or modification.
- 5. Contextual Preservation: Artifacts cannot be removed from their original context for remixing.
- 6. No Commercial Extraction: The dead do not labor. Their data cannot be used to train commercial models.
- 7. The Right to be Forgotten: The ultimate form of rest is deletion, if that was the wish of the deceased.
Field Note: Adopting the Right to Rest Protocol means rejecting the Terms of Service of major platforms, which often claim perpetual, royalty-free licenses to user content even after death.