Virtual Will: Reflections on Digital Inheritance and the Future of Testament

Abstract

This article aims to discuss how to test in Brazilian law and its challenges in the face of an increasingly digital social routine. In this sense, we start from the current state of jurisprudence, which tends to mitigate the formal rigor of the will, to demonstrate how the coronavirus pandemic accelerated the emergence of the digital public. This whole scenario accentuates the debates on how the era of virtual communication influences the emergence of last will manifestations through digital platforms and social media, being certain that the growing accumulation of digital assets and data will necessarily lead to the necessary forecast of your post mortem destination, not only by the traditional acts of last will dispositions, but also by the respective platforms where the referred digital contents are inserted. It is worth noting that the examination now proposed does not neglect the distinction between digital content of a patrimonial and existencial nature.