Obituary Watch · by Bikoosh
Your obituaries are being republished. Do you know where?
Third-party websites copy funeral homes' obituaries wholesale, outrank the original in search, and surround them with ads, flower sales, and "virtual candles" the family never asked for. Separately, impostor pages copy funeral announcements and post livestream links that ask grieving families for card details. Obituary Watch monitors both — daily, with evidence and ready-to-send takedown documents.
Free scan: enter your website · no account · private report · families can use the livestream link check free, no email needed
This is documented, not hypothetical
Canada's Federal Court awarded $20 million in damages against Afterlife Network for republishing obituaries and photographs at scale (CBC coverage · Thomson v. Afterlife Network Inc., 2019 FC 545). Service Corporation International, the largest funeral provider in North America, has litigated against Echovita over the same practice. Industry vendors have warned about obituary scraping since 2014 — yet the standing defense at most funeral homes is a copyright line in the website footer that nobody reads and nothing enforces.
What it watches
- Republication — your obituary text and photos appearing on third-party sites that are not in your approved list. Checked daily against a curated registry of known republication domains, plus fresh-domain monitoring.
- Livestream-pattern pages — your announcements appearing on newly registered domains that carry livestream and payment vocabulary — the pattern behind pages that ask families for card details to "watch the service".
- Near-name domains — web addresses one letter away from yours, registered fresh.
How it works
- Point it at your website. We politely read your own obituary pages to know what to protect — new obituaries are picked up daily, automatically.
- Daily checks. Known republication domains, fresh certificate-transparency domains, and content-similarity signals, compared against your published obituaries.
- Alerts with the paperwork done. A finding comes with an evidence snapshot and a takedown kit: DMCA notice citing the $20M precedent, Google deindex request, registrar and host abuse reports, and a family-communication template.
Findings are similarity signals for you to confirm — never verdicts about a website or company. Decedent names, obituary text, and photos never appear on any public page — reports are private to you.
Pricing
HOME
$29 /month · or $290/year
- 1 funeral home website, daily monitoring
- New obituaries protected automatically
- Email alerts on new findings only
- Evidence snapshots + full takedown kits
- Approved-list control (aggregators you work with)
GROUP
$79 /month
- Up to 5 locations / websites
- Everything in Home, per location
- One consolidated weekly digest
Answers
- Our funeral home got a Facebook "trademark violation" notice — is it real?
- How to check a funeral livestream link before you click pay
- An obituary from our funeral home was republished without permission — what now?
- How to protect your funeral home's obituaries from scraping
- How to remove an obituary from an aggregator site
- How to report a fake funeral stream page
- Third-party sites are selling flowers on our obituaries
- What is obituary piracy?
- Who owns the copyright to an obituary?
Obituary Watch provides monitoring assistance, not legal advice, and is not affiliated with any funeral home, streaming provider, or platform. Findings are similarity signals that require human confirmation — they are not accusations about any website or company. Weekly aggregate numbers are public in the Obituary Piracy Index.